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April 19, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
47:22
WarRoom Battleground EP 276: A Patriot's History Of The United States
Participants
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l
larry schweikart
30:52
s
steve bannon
14:50
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Speaker Time Text
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
This is what you're fighting for.
I mean, every day you're out there.
What they're doing is blowing people off.
If you continue to look the other way and shut up, then the oppressors, the authoritarians get total control and total power.
Because this is just like in Arizona.
This is just like in Georgia. It's another element that backs them into a quarter and shows their lies and misrepresentations.
This is why this audience is going to have to get engaged.
As we've told you, this is the fight.
unidentified
All this nonsense, all this spin, they can't handle the truth.
War Room. Battleground.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, welcome. Wednesday, 19 April, Year of Our Lord, 2023.
Very special guest, Larry Schweikert, the author or the co-author of The Patriot's History of the United States and a very special Patriot's History it is.
Larry, this is the 15th anniversary.
What is the 15th anniversary in the 40th printing?
I mean, how many books today go through 40 printings at all?
And how many do it in 15 years, sir?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, not very many, Steve.
You'll love this one. I found a little factoid that Howard Zinn once said of his People's History, that in its first 10 years, it went through 25 printings and sold over 300,000 copies.
Well, in the first 10 years of Patriots history, we sold over 320,000 copies and went through 27 printings.
So I don't know if we're catching him now because so many schools use his book, but...
And especially when you consider the book came out in 2004, and it kind of leveled off for a while.
And then in 2010, when I was on Glenn Beck's show, when he had a lot of viewers, three and a half million viewers a night, it just exploded.
And it's been staying up there ever since.
I mean, I thought we were only in our, like, 30th printing or something.
I asked the publisher, where are we now?
40th printing. I mean, that's a lot.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Tell me, let's go.
I want to compare and contrast. You kind of wrote it as a response to Howard Zinn.
Walk people through the people's history of the United States and the damage that's done.
And then I want to compare and contrast, because as you know, I'm a huge fan of your book, The Patriots of the United States, and you've got The Modern World, all of it.
But look, I wanted the initial...
When I always thought of it when it first came out, it was always in comparison to Howard Zinn's book.
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
And that's how most people thought it was, and actually our origins were a little different.
Mike and I just wanted a textbook that we didn't have to argue against when we taught our U.S. history class.
We found that all of the existing textbooks, we were constantly arguing against the book.
That's no way to teach.
And we'd heard of people's history, but the book wasn't really designed to be an antidote or a counter to that because we really didn't know a whole lot about it.
We were too busy working on our own book, and it was huge.
You see how big it is behind me.
It's 1,000 pages.
And when we turned it into the publisher, it was 2,000 pages.
And they go, uh, you have to cut a little bit here.
So, uh, But we did take on all of the lies and all of the mistruths that are in people's history of the United States.
And this has affected so many people because, as I said, it is on all college campuses.
Virtually every college campus will have some U.S. history course that uses people's history of the United States to teach the history.
And it's just rotten in so many ways I can't even begin with it.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Oh, hang on. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Larry, it's worse. It's in most high schools, I think.
I see people assign this to public.
People's history to public.
And you've got all the celebrities that came out.
We're all morons, right?
But they say you've got to read the people's history.
The people's history essentially is a work by a Marxist.
And it's a Marxist history of the United States.
Walk through... What do you come up with?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, as Mike and I said in our introduction to our book, we don't believe in America, my country, right or wrong, but we certainly reject the notion of my country always wrong.
And that's what the Marxist perspective gives you.
When you start with that, the notion is that anything America ever did could not be good It could not be true or honest or noble or right.
It was always the result of some capitalist taint, some taint by dead white guys that skewed the history into being this whitewash of what really happened.
And so to get where he wants to go, and this is very important for your viewers, Zinn had to lie.
And he had to lie and lie and lie.
And the way he lied most of the time was through the use of a little literary trick called the ellipses.
I know you know what this is, but for viewers out there who don't know what it is, when you write a sentence and you leave something out, you put three dots to show, hey, I left something out here.
Now, the rule of thumb is it's fine to leave something out as long as it doesn't change the meaning.
If you leave something out, like the word not, if you leave something out and it changes the meaning, that's absolutely verboten.
That is not acceptable because you're lying.
And Zinn did this all the time.
Let me give you a real quick example of Columbus.
His section on Columbus arriving to meet the Arawak Indians He portrays it as Columbus walks ashore waving his sword and then says, ah, these Indians had made great slaves.
And of course he leaves out all the intermediate stuff that went on and basically what happened was Columbus arrives with sword and sheath and meets with these Indians and they don't all speak the same language, obviously.
So they've got to work quite a while on interpreting And finally, he notices that they have cuts and bruises and so forth, and he says, where did you get those?
And they said, another Indian tribe is trying to enslave us.
And he said, well, they were handsome and strong creatures, and I could see why someone would want to make slaves of them.
He was basically saying, well, I can see why those guys were trying to enslave you.
And then he goes on, Zin makes it look like Columbus was threatening them with his sword, when in fact, They didn't have any metal weapons.
And they look at his sword and they go, what's that, what's that?
And he pulls it out and shows it to them.
This is a totally different interchange, exchange between Columbus and the Indians and the way Zinn makes it appear, which is this kind of Hitler arriving on the shore with his sword.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Let me go. There's two things that you combat in the Patriots history, and I recommend, can we get it up on the screen, Memphis, if we get a chance?
The reason I wanted to do this, and we're going to talk about things that are going on today, too, but I wanted to Larry on here.
I'm such a big fan of his in this book.
You see it right there, the 15th anniversary edition.
It's in paperback now, but I do recommend that all the parents, particularly grandparents, particularly if you have a young person That's maybe not to that stage yet that they're a voracious reader or something like that to get this book.
Because I think they will delve into it, and they will learn a lot.
And not just that, the way Mike and Larry have written it, it's a page turner.
It's very accessible.
It's not a stiff academic text.
It's not a typical history text.
It's incredibly engaging.
Larry, I think that's what you and Michael did, which was so powerful, is you made it accessible.
It's like you're reading A great narrative history of the country.
The other thing that came up, and I think part of this was...
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, sir.
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, you know, I can't...
I just finished a homeschool convention, and we have a full curriculum for high schoolers that goes with this book, including me teaching every chapter in video, 22 chapters, 22 units.
You can see this at wildworldofhistory.com.
That's my website, wildworldofhistory.com.
But I can't tell you how rewarding it is to have eighth graders, and sometimes even younger, come up and go, oh, I read your book.
Such a good book. I love your book.
Eighth graders. It reads, my phrase is it reads like butter.
It really is an easy read despite the imposing nature of the size of the book.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
You had, and I think the opposing nature actually makes it better, because once people are into it, they go, hey, I can handle reading a big book like this.
It gets to be something they can turn around.
There's two things. One, you were kind of a counter to Zen, but almost as importantly, and I think you guys, maybe it wasn't at the top of their mind, but you definitely had something to do with how powerful this book got in the early 2010, was the 1619 Project.
Because if you want to have a counter, and we've had some great people that put up information as counter, and they're all terrific.
But if you want to read a sweeping narrative history of the arc of America for all her faults, and it's really a journey of overcoming these issues, right, and the conflicts around it, and always going next level.
Walk me through the 1619 Project.
How does that compare and contrast to the story we read in the Patriots' history?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, the 1619 Project, in a nutshell, says that America is not exceptional because America had slaves beginning in 1619 in Virginia.
And what we argue in Patriots history is from the four pillars of American exceptionalism.
Pillar one, a Christian, mostly Protestant, religious tradition, which is important not for reasons of theology, but because of the bottom-up nature of Of the pilgrims and the Puritans and most of the early sects, the Quakers, who settled here, they were bottom-up religion.
Number two is common law, which is a bottom-up way of doing government.
That is, God puts the law in the hearts of the people.
This is mentioned twice in the Bible, once in the Old Testament, once in the New Testament.
God puts the law in the hearts of the people, and they select or elect leaders To carry that out.
Pillar number three is private property with written titles and deeds, something much of Africa still doesn't have today.
And number four is a free market economy.
You'll notice what word was left out of that.
Slavery. Slavery appears nowhere in the four pillars of American exceptionalism because, A, it was ubiquitous.
It was everywhere. Everybody had slaves, and the Muslims at the time were the largest slave traders in the world.
And B, it had nothing to do with the other four pillars, the most important of which are the first two, the ground-up religion and the bottom-up governance.
And so that's why we argue that Plymouth and not Jamestown was really the focus of America's founding, and therefore the 1619 Project is irrelevant.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Because James, walk me through that.
Being a Virginian, I remember as a young boy, it was always this huge controversy every Thanksgiving.
This is back in the 50s and the 60s.
Who had the first Thanksgiving?
Who was really the founder of Jamestown?
As you grow older, You realize that Jamestown is a group of freebooters, right?
Entrepreneurs, we'll call them. Freebooters.
And Plymouth was really an incredible—and I gotta tell you, both of the stories are incredible because they barely hung on.
But the Plymouth thing is extraordinary.
But why do you say that Plymouth is more important?
Why is the bottom-up and the religious nature of it more important than the more entrepreneurial freebooter element of the American spirit?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, Jamestown, of course, did not have any bottom-up religion.
Anyone who was religious was an Anglican, and that's top-down.
Also, they didn't have common law.
They were governed by the London Company, who was in turn governed by the king.
But on the Mayflower, before they even get off the boat, they select their own governor and...
They say, all right, we got these guys called strangers.
They're not pilgrims.
They're not Puritans. We're going to make them equal.
And that was unheard of in human history that you would make other people who didn't necessarily have the same rights you thought you had and just give them your rights as well.
So it's those two bottom-up elements That I think make Plymouth the heartland, the cradle of America.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Is that incorporated in the Mayflower Compact?
They basically understood they needed some governing instrument, and in doing that, the strangers who were some of the sailors and other people that weren't part of the sect itself, they gave them equal status in that, and then everybody had to pull together.
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Right, and they call themselves a body politic.
Which is kind of interesting, an interesting phrase.
And of course, you know, the first thing they did was they told the king that they weren't engaged in treason because they were in the wrong spot.
Oh, great king, buddy, pal, listen, man, we didn't mean to be here.
Please don't draw and quarter us.
And then they went into the whole governance thing.
But as you mentioned, both colonies did suffer incredibly from their stupidity In accepting a socialist form of economics when they got off the boat.
And of course at Jamestown after the second winter they had the starving time where the diaries reflect that the people were eating rats and dung and shoelaces and you know my wife and I love these cooking shows like Chopped.
And you get the market basket of goods.
Oh, look what we have here.
Rat, dung, shoelaces, and a rock.
And of course, you know, the cooks always know, well, I'm great.
I know what I'm doing with that. I'm going to make a rat puree over baked dung.
Anyway, and they both colonies quickly throughout socialism, Jamestown within two years and Plymouth within one year, William Bradford said he was speaking about socialism, and he said, it is though we thought we were wiser than God to adopt socialism.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Walk me through, you know, he's talked about the first two, the Christian, and it's not about theology.
You're saying a bottoms-up, not the Catholicism, not Anglican, which was really a spinoff, not these religions that really have a priest caste, and it kind of comes down from the top, and it has nothing to do with your religious beliefs or how holy you are or how close to God,
just the difference. When you say bottom-up there in English common law, Of being bottom up there, not looking at the law, the commercial law, the British East India Company or any of these, the Virginia Company, whatever's put together that goes back to the king, he gets his 20 % off the top, then you divvy up the rest.
The big guy, right?
The big guy. You would Think that that would lay out populism.
And today, you know, we're talking about this populist nationalist movement, really MAGA's kind of taking over the Republican Party.
And we talk about populism, we talk about Andrew Jackson.
Are you saying, and we listed the four, you said the first two were really the driving forces of American exceptionalism.
Is that because American exceptionalism was predicated upon what we would refer to as populism?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
I think that's fair.
I mean, you look at these guys, they, um, They created a system in which not only were they equal, but they said, we are so equal that we think that even if you pose a slight threat, not a mortal threat, but a slight threat to our theology or our way of life, we aren't going to kill you.
We aren't even going to torture you.
We're just going to say, you've got to go someplace else.
You can't stay here.
And so that's what we see with Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and so many others is the Puritans, unlike any other group in history, including many Protestant churches in Europe, they didn't burn you at the stake because you were, in their view, a heretic.
They just said, nah, that doesn't fly here.
Go someplace else. And so how about Rhode Island?
Yeah, that's a good place. Go to Rhode Island.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
One of the things, not criticism, our observation is that, and you see in your book, it has been from the beginning.
There was definitely a conflict between the white settlers that came and the Aborigines or the Native Americans that were here, from the constant.
What I don't, I think that critics of this Missed the point that the Native Americans, the Indians, were very sophisticated.
They had a very sophisticated way of their own foreign policy.
They had series of alliances and networks and either enslaving other tribes.
But from the very person you see it in Plymouth and you see it in Virginia.
And it rolls throughout the entire History of really till the, I guess, the 1880s, that the Indians have a very sophisticated, and it comes up in the French-Indian Wars where you had these alliances, right, the Iroquois and the Hurons.
Talk to us about that. Talk to us about the sophistication of how, whether it was Pontiac or Tecumseh, they had an incredibly sophisticated view of how they dealt with each other, and the Whites were just part of that.
The Mexicans in the Southwest, And the whites that came in on the eastern seaboard.
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, and this is, as you rightly say, this is reflected in their alliances.
And at first, none of them thought the whites would be the power to worry about.
To them, we were a new group.
The whites were usurpers, but no different to the Hurons than the Mohicans, or no different to the Mohicans than the And as you mentioned, the far west, as you get further west, you see very shocking wars between the Sioux and the Cheyenne.
And what's so astounding, one of the great heroes in American history is Chief Sitting Bull of the Sioux.
And what he did that was so astounding was that he allied all five of the Sioux tribes who didn't get along together, and somehow he got the Cheyenne, their hated enemy, to join in the alliance as well against Custer and Terry and some of the rest.
So there's a book that we source on this, a fairly recent book, called The Middle Ground by Richard White, and he makes this very argument that the Indians were Constantly playing one tribe off against the other, against the whites, against the Spanish, whoever it was.
It was just, think of Bavaria, or one of the smaller Saxony, one of the small German states in the border between Prussia and France and Austria, trying to stay alive, and that's the way most of these Indian confederations were.
And by the way, Steve, you know, talking about sophistication, we always hear how the The Dutch swindled the Indians out of Long Island for trinkets and blankets worth only a few hundred dollars.
But you've got to remember two things.
One is the Indians in that area, like the Plains Indians, had no sense of private property and land.
That is, they did not think it was possible for a human to actually own a Of course, when fences go up, they go, what's going on here?
This isn't right. So second thing is, they did not have iron.
They did not have skillets.
They did not have some of the finer woven blankets and stuff or clods that were being exchanged to them.
In other words, the Indians thought they were getting the better of that deal.
We're getting all this stuff you can actually possess, and we're trading away what was to them rights to the heir.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I want to go, there's another thing in the book that comes up in American history I don't think is discussed enough, is this, there's a tendency, and particularly in certain parts of the country, for these massive religious revivals in its upstate New York, I think they call it the Burnt Over District.
I mean, if you look at the number of religions and sects That come out of there.
If you study world history, it's pretty amazing that certain parts of North America with the settlers have come up with the, you know, there's dozens and dozens.
I think New York State has generated, I don't know, a half a dozen to 12 Major religious movements and sects.
What is it about that? What is it about this country?
What is it about the land? What is it about the structure of society that led, particularly in the 18th and early 19th century, mid-19th century, the formation of so many of these religious movements?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, that's a good question.
You know, it's very interesting in that it ties into our adaptation of the very language.
We have a language called American that is nothing like English, and it starts very early in the early 1700s, and you begin to incorporate foreign words such as boss from the Dutch, later lasso, lariat, patio from the Spanish, or portage, or cash, or crevasse from the French.
Or from black slaves caucus or mass meeting.
And so a lot of our language starts to also come out of our religious experience there.
So we had a campfire meeting.
And these are especially popular in the Carolinas area where preachers would go out and just hold a church service in a forest around a campfire.
And this goes back to the bottom up, right?
Because you didn't have to wait to be an ordained minister.
If you could read the Bible and you could convince people that your interpretation of it was pretty sound, people would follow you.
And you would have a church, which is really where Methodism grows in America, is in these campfire meetings.
So you get up to New York and you've got, again, This guy Joseph Smith goes out and he says, hey, I found these tablets.
I'm going to tell a compelling tale, top to bottom, believe it or not.
And he develops the Church of Latter-day Saints.
And you've got Seventh-day Adventists.
You've got Christian scientists all coming out of this.
Well, why? Because it's all bottom-up.
It's all coming from the people.
It's not being directed top-down.
And when you made that comment about people coming over here almost like criminals, I forget your exact phrase, I was thinking, well, sort of like Australia, right?
We're almost like Australia.
But indeed, the church experience was based on this idea of independence that laity could lead church services and meetings in a very democratic manner.
Of course, that's exactly what the Quakers are.
Anyone can stand up and speak and no one is addressed as sir or that kind of thing.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
How big a figure is Andrew Jackson?
In the midst of time, he's kind of considered bloody, bloody Andrew Jackson when President Trump embraced him.
People were shocked. Back when you read those histories, he's as big as Washington and Lincoln.
In the Patriots history, in your arc, tell me about Jackson and populism, particularly the anti-Federal Reserve or the anti-Bank of the United States, central bank idea that he had.
He hated central banks.
He hated bankers. Right.
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, Jackson gets almost a full chapter in our book.
Surprisingly, people think that Jackson shrank government.
He did not. Government grew every year under Jackson, maybe not as fast, but it still grew, grew per capita, grew in total dollar terms.
Jackson's a very strange guy.
He leads these Indian campaigns in Florida and then right before The Battle of New Orleans, he leads an Indian campaign against the Creek Indians known as the Red Sticks.
And he very much detests many of the Indians because he thinks they allied with the British in the American Revolution.
He is opposed to some banks.
And we argue that it's a myth that he hated all banks because he Takes the money out of the Bank of the United States and puts it in a whole bunch of his friends' banks.
He was just against the BUS because it was in the wrong hands.
It was in the hands of the Whigs, and he wanted to take away their money and put it in the hands of the Democrats.
Bank of the United States, and this was my specialty back in grad school.
My PhD is really in economic history.
But the Bank of the United States was not a central bank.
The government only owned 20 % of it.
They didn't really direct much of anything.
And most of all, the bankers and the people were very happy.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Hang on for one second, Larry.
We're going to take a short commercial break.
We're back. It's the 15th anniversary, the 40th printing of a seminal work in the MAGA movement.
That would be the Patriots' history of the United States.
unidentified
We're going to be back in the warm in just a second.
.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
For the Patriot's history of the United States, its 15th anniversary, its 40th printing.
Larry, for particularly our young charges that are going to get this now from their parents at 1,000 pages, you know that you're getting a book when you get this, right?
There's no doubt. It's a hefty title.
But you shocked me, and I think I've done this three or four times with Larry.
He's such a great storyteller that I love having him on.
You cut 1,000 pages out.
First off, how did you and Michael decide that?
Did that get rolled into the modern history, or is that 1,000 pages always could be a supplement we could republish?
I mean, how did you figure out how to do that?
That's not easy. Dealing with authors before...
I can tell you, getting it taken 20 pages out is like pulling teeth.
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, remember, our purpose was to get a textbook that we thought we could use to teach with.
And we didn't think we were going to get a publisher.
We thought we'd print it and bind it and sell it out of the back of a van or maybe along with other banned items such as plastic straws in California.
unidentified
You know, buddy, plastic straws.
Patriot's history. But, uh...
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
There were lots of vignettes and character studies, such as Mike Fink, King of the River, and just dozens of Indian chiefs and so on.
All sorts of people throughout history that we would give a page or a page and a half of kind of a character study or a business study.
So all of those went.
All the sidebars, except I think two of them, went.
And that chopped a lot.
But the rest of the material, a lot of it can be found on the wildworldofhistory.com website.
If you look around under the blogs and some of the other things there, I put many, many of these things in little one to one and a half page vignettes that are free, free on the site.
So just go to wildworldofhistory.com and look around there.
Even then, when we turned it into the publisher, it was still about 1,200 pages, and the editor there took out 200.
And even then, she said, we've got to get another, I forget what she said, 2,000 words out of it.
And she couldn't figure out how to do it, so we sent it to an outside editor who cut it yet again and actually made it work.
And remember this, for all the people that are watching this, every time I update it, or Mike and I update this thing, we've got to cut more stuff.
Because we're adding more stuff.
So, it's always a battle for a history brain.
unidentified
Why do you cut out? Two questions I got.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Number one, you were one of the first guys I know that saw the potential in Trump, in Trumpism.
Given your understanding of the arc of American history, why was, when Trump came on the scene, not his presidency, but why was the beginning of the Trump movement something that you could see the resonance of?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, that's easy, because in the Bush administration, what we saw was that the elites tried to ram through amnesty.
And for the first time in my memory, the people stood up and said, no, absolutely not.
They so flooded Congress, the phone calls and angry telegrams and letters and emails.
Do you remember this?
They had to pull the amnesty bill that Bush and Congress I mean, that's a big win, right?
I know they've gotten around it in other ways, but that was a big win at that time.
And being here in Arizona, even though I was living in Ohio at the time, but I'm acutely aware of the impact of illegal immigration.
So when I saw Trump in less than a month after he announced, here in Phoenix, I was on vacation here in Phoenix, and I saw that his speaking venue had been moved from the Phoenician Hotel, which Held like 200 to the Phoenix Convention Center, which held thousands.
I knew he was on to something, and based on what I kept hearing people talk about, it was illegal immigration.
Now, it might not be quite the issue today that it was in 16, but in 16, That was a huge issue, and Trump was over here, and there were 16 other candidates on the other side of the stage, and there was no question in my mind that he had achieved the high moral ground on the illegal immigration debate.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I know it's too early for a historian to be able to place it, but as your first cut, his first term, his presidency to date, we know he's coming back after a tough slog for a second term, but where do you put him in the arc of presidents and the country as your first cut?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, prior to China virus, prior to 2020, I would have had him in the top five in terms of What he achieved, number one, what he achieved relative to what he said he was going to do, which is at the top of everybody except George Washington.
I mean, he achieved almost everything he said he was going to do, or he got it as far as he could possibly get it with Congress before they would block him.
Then the China virus hit, and that caused him a number of problems.
Most notably, he had to make a choice whether To advance the vaccine or let it run its course, and I know what he was being advised by everybody.
It's the same thing Bush was being advised in 2002, which was the WMDs are there.
Everybody says they're going to kill millions.
You've got to take them out, and Trump was being besieged by this same thing.
This virus will kill 20 million Americans if you don't Hit it.
And hit it hard. And so he briefly, for a period of about six months, kind of fell into that.
And that damaged him.
But more important, the lockdowns allowed the Democrat Party to engage in massive widespread cheating that we had never seen before.
The other thing that you have to rate presidents on, I'm sorry, it's like winning in the playoffs.
You know, oh, Dallas Cowboys have a great team.
Well, how many Super Bowls have they won since the 90s?
None. Okay. They don't have a great team.
You've got to win elections.
And even if it was by fraud, Trump lost.
And so you can't give him an A for his first presidential term.
I give him an A minus or B plus because of the China virus response and the fact that he had some responsibility in the fraud and not seeking it out and And attacking it earlier than he did.
But he comes back.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
You're saying your Washington, Lincoln, Jackson, I take it, Reagan, FDR is the top five.
You're saying all of those won re-election.
If you want to get in that upper tier, whether they steal it or not, you've got to check it off that.
Look, we're adamant that he won, right?
But unfortunately, he's not at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
It was stolen. And by the way, my top five would be Washington.
Nobody can top Washington for what he did for this country.
Lincoln. And then number three, I have Reagan.
And then number four, I've got Calvin Coolidge, who gave us five years of peace and prosperity and got reelected.
And then I would probably put Trump up there right close to that.
And Grover Cleveland.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Larry, you're a former libertarian, correct?
If you've got Calvin Coolidge, you've got to be a libertarian.
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
I love Silent Cal.
For your viewers who don't know Calvin Coolidge, you've got to read about this guy.
He was literally born on the 4th of July, right?
And he's known as Silent Cal because he just didn't say a whole lot.
He just got immediately to the nub of the issue and shut up.
And so he's at a dinner party one night, and this woman looks over and says, Mr.
President, I bet you a dollar I can get you to say more than three words.
And he looks at her and he says, you lose.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
No, he was, by the way, the people that love him and have studied it loving.
I know there's a number of, there's a Calvin Coolidge Society, there's been a number of books, people that love him, love him.
Today, when you look at the transgender ideology, when you look at the invasion on the southern border, when you look at what has happened geopolitically that now we're in a war at the Eurasian landmass with what I call the Legion of Doom, China, Russia, Persia, you know, Saudi Arabia.
When you look at what's happened, you're an economic historian, you look at what's happening in the de-dollarization, the spending, the debt out of control, the Federal Reserve really as a backstop that just keeps printing money.
Everything that's just happened since the Biden regime has come in.
Put that in the arc.
I keep saying, particularly the concentration of wealth, if the framers came back and are founding, if the revolutionary generation, number one, and then the framers, because they were kind of two different groups, came back today, they would spit on the floor of what we have allowed to happen to this great republic.
I'd like your thoughts, sir.
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
No, that's right.
I mean, if you look objectively, and of course, no Democrat can be objective, But if you look objectively and you said, if somebody deliberately wanted to destroy this nation, would they have done anything different than what Joe Biden, as I affectionately call him, the rutabaga, would they have done anything different than what he has done?
And the answer is no. He hasn't done one thing to make America stronger, and every single thing he has done has made us weaker.
And then you mentioned the kind of trans movement I sensed a couple of years ago that that was going to be a serious, serious focal point and maybe the tipping point in the war against woke.
And I think we're seeing that finally appear everywhere from the public disdain of Disney.
And how its recent movies have all—they haven't crashed, but none of them have made their money back, and none of them are going to be money winners, whether it's Ant-Man, whether it's the DC version, which is Black Adam or Shazam.
And then you look at movies today that have no woke message at all.
Whether it's Jesus Revolution, which has made an astounding $153 million on an investment of under $500,000.
Are you kidding me? Or you look at John Wick 4, which is at $350 million.
Or you look at the Mario Brothers movie, which in one weekend has eclipsed Ant-Man.
And none of these have an ounce of woke in them.
So people are really...
Battling back, and our most recent, which everybody knows about, was the Bud Light fiasco, where this idiot mid-level executive, these people all come from marketing and human relations, and you get this person out there that puts a transoid as the As the face of Bud Light.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
But these big corporations have been all into this gay pride and all into the rainbow thing for a long time.
It's zero probability she made the decision.
That went up the chain command.
They're all saying now, oh, we didn't do it.
I've only got 10 minutes.
I've got to do two things. Number one, The Patriots History of the Modern World, the Patriots History itself technically cuts off when.
When do you stop? This book ends when?
And then you've got two volumes later of the Patriots History of the Modern World.
So where does Patriots History leave us?
And then where do you pick up on the Patriots History of the Modern World, which is a separate book, separate two volumes?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Okay. So Patriots History of the United States goes up to 2018 in this edition.
I have been working on and have updated The period 2018 to 23, I will make it available free on the wildworldofhistory.com website, probably sometime later this summer.
It's basically one new chapter, a big chapter, and a lot of inserted stuff that we had to take out earlier in various places.
So you can kind of read along and read the book and then read what's on the web and PDF and insert it yourself.
Patriot's History of the Modern World came about in 2012 and 2013.
And again, it was so big.
It was about 1500 pages when we turned it in.
They made us break it into two books, volume one, volume two.
And actually those cut off a little bit sooner than Patriot's History of the United States because when we finished those, it was about 2013 and Patriot's History of the United States cuts off at 2018.
And so I will be updating that.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
But you're able to do a more in-depth look at the modern world, whereas Patriots history may be a little more condensed in that.
You're able to do a more thing. Oh, it's Lyndon Marks.
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
It's Lyndon Marks, Gandhi, all the big names, right?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Yes. You have been very focused.
I've known you for a number of years, since before the first Trump victory, back in my Breitbart days.
You have been very focused, as many of us have, on globalization.
And I know you're working on a big project.
I don't know if we want to announce it now, maybe later.
But walk me through globalization, your take on globalization, and the impact that's had on American history.
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, first thing people need to understand, as with all things, nothing is new under the sun.
Solomon said that.
Globalism is not a new phenomenon.
The Congress of Vienna in 1814 was the first meeting of the globalists.
And of course, on the outside, they were supposed to be meeting to just reconstruct Europe after Napoleon.
But everybody in Europe, kind of more of the common people, thought that they were going to undertake a major attempt to get rid of monarchs and put in place representative governments.
And that didn't happen at all.
One of the advisers to Metternich, one of the four big names at the Congress of Vienna, said they think we're up here to give power to the people, but basically we're up here to carve up Europe like a turkey.
And so you can...
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Is this why Henry Kissinger loves Metternich so much and wrote his thesis?
Yes. His first book was on Metternich.
unidentified
Is this why Henry the Kay loves the Congress?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
He thinks that's a great thing that they did.
He says they ushered in an era of peace.
He forgot about the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War, merely two major wars in the next 50 years.
I mean... Yeah, that's peace, all right.
But we could jump up to Versailles, which most of your viewers know about in trying to reestablish Europe after World War I. And literally, Wilson and George Clemenceau and David Lloyd George were huddled around maps Bending over, as one observer said, like a giant gorilla in an ivory suit.
And they're moving boundaries, and they're moving map lines, and they're literally moving millions of people who are contained in these lines without any regard to national ethnicity or heritage or anything else.
And they're creating thousands of problems as they do this.
But again, they were playing God.
They thought they could play God.
And you can then go up to the post-World War II era where the scientists, They championed a global body to take care of nuclear weapons, atomic weapons, and they thought that only this global body would be able to control the spread of these weapons.
And gee, maybe that global body should be run by scientists.
And so I carry this new book, Patriot's History of Globalism, Its Rise and Decline.
I carry that all the way up to the present, and we are seeing some evidence of the decline of globalism.
These guys are on their heels.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Give me, by the time we get about four minutes left, I want your perspective of a lot of people in our audience.
Obviously, we're the platform for MAGA. We've got all these activists, fighters every day.
But I do get every now and again and think, hey, it feels so terrible for the country.
I want to give up. I just don't see any hope.
The forces arrayed against us.
A raid against patriots and sovereignists are so great.
What are your words of wisdom for us, understanding the deep roots in the history of this country from the early, what, the early 17th, the early 16th century?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
Well, to quote the Black Knight after both his arms and both his legs were cut off, I've had worse!
You know, we've been in worse shape.
We've actually almost fallen to the British.
They'd actually captured Washington, D.C., The Civil War, we came within one battle of losing that and becoming two nations.
There were times in World War II, right before the Battle of Midway, that it looked like the Allies might actually lose and we'd have to negotiate a peace with Hitler.
So one answer is we've been here before and history has a way of surprising people and has a way of turning on a dime.
But I would say a more important message is the message that Gandalf gives to the little hobbit when they're on the ramparts there in the final battle of Minas Tirith.
And they're looking at, and there's tens and tens of thousands of orcs everywhere.
And the little hobbit basically says, we can't win this, can we?
And Gandalf looks down and he says, no, we can't.
But sometimes those are the most important battles to fight.
Now, I think we can win it, but even if we couldn't, this is the most important battle we have to fight.
We have to fight it sometime.
Why not now? As Kennedy said, if not us, who?
If not now, when?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Larry, how do people get to all your content?
larry schweikart ▲ ● ▼
How do they get all this? Okay, so we've got WildWorldHistory.com.
We have a great book offer now.
on the presidents, which is Patriots History and Reagan, the American president, and Dragonslayers, in which I interviewed you several times.
And we've got an ongoing Buy Larry a Coffee program.
We're going to make Patriots History into a movie by hook or by crook.
And there will be a place on there where you can buy Larry a coffee for five bucks.
Every dime goes into the movie fund.
And so if you don't see it there, email me at larry.com.
At wildworldofhistory.com, and I'll give you the coffee link, but you can get everything, including the two out-of-print volumes of Patriot's History, The Modern World in PDF on the wildworldofhistory.com.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Larry, it's been an honor to have you on here.
Congratulations. As a counter to Howard Zinn, 15 years, the 15th anniversary, 40 printings, and you're still grinding away.
It's still a great storyteller and a great spirit.
The MAGA movement has its own historians, so in-house historians.
Thank you. Honored to have you on here, sir.
unidentified
Thank you, Steve. Okay, we're going to be back.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
We'll be back live again tomorrow at 10 a.m.
It'll be as heated as anything you've seen.
There's so much going on in the world today.
I've never seen a news cycle like this, and it's only going to get more intense and more intense and more intense.
And that's why, you know, one thing I didn't get a chance to ask Larry, but I'll have him back on in the weeks and talk about artificial intelligence, transhumanism, the convergence into the...
Into all this, to the singularity.
The point, Homo sapiens on this side, Homo sapiens plus on the other.
A massive major inflection point in all of human history.
We'll be back at 10 o'clock.
Maybe the more, I don't say mundane, but more nuts and bolts of the modern world and your place in it when we return tomorrow morning, 10 a.m.
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