 Can you hear me okay back there? I guess we've had that. This looks like it was set up for Tom Woods or Anthony Faucian, like that. The topic that Jeff assigned me, a strategy against woke, what turns out that Hayek and Mises had this strategy worked out many years ago, 60 and 70 years ago. I'm gonna start with a couple of quotes from Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises on the topic and then I'm gonna explain about how some of my own research fits in here and I think it is a strategy, an academic strategy that we need to use to fight the totalitarians that are missed, as Hayek called them. And the first little quote I wanna read you is from the famous road to serfdom, 1944. There's a chapter called the end of truth and if you wanna know what's going on in American society today, read that chapter. And here's something that Hayek said, he said that in the disciplines dealing directly with human affairs and therefore most immediately affecting political views such as history, law or economics, the disinterested search for truth cannot be allowed in a totalitarian system and the vindication of the official views becomes the sole object. It's easily seen. These disciplines have indeed in all totalitarian countries become the most fertile factories of the official myths which the rulers use to guide the minds and wills of their subjects, official myths. Now I've been at this a long time and one of my books that I co-authored in 1992 was called official lies how Washington misleads us. And this was, I wrote this before I ran across this Hayek statement. So great minds think alike, I guess. So that's my official lies prop. Another thing that he said, this is Hayek again in the same chapter at Rhodes-Hurton, the whole apparatus for spreading knowledge, the schools, the press, the radio and motion pictures will be used exclusively to spread those views which will strengthen the belief and the rightness of decisions taken by the authority and all information that might cause doubt or hesitation will be withheld. And in my notes here, I wrote like Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and so forth. And this was 1944, he's writing this. In Murray Rothbard's essay, Anatomy of the State, he wrote about how there are different methods the totalitarian states can use to crush dissent and mass murder of Soviet style is a little risky because the people might not like that, they might fight back. So propaganda in brainwashing can be an effective, cheaper tool for to get the public to submit. And that is certainly in keeping with what Hayek was saying here. Now, Mises himself addresses the same topic in his book, Theory and History, published in 1957. And he said this, to lie about historical facts and to destroy evidence, I have Hillary Clinton, let me write in there, and to destroy evidence has been in the opinion of statesmen, diplomats, politicians, and writers, a legitimate part of the conduct of public affairs and of writing history. And then he says, one of the main problems of historical research is to unmask such falsehoods. So of course, that's sort of what I've been up to for quite a while also. That's why my other book is called Lincoln Unmasked, my second book, Unmasking Falsehoods. And so these are the enemies we're talking about. And one more quote from Mises. He says, many historians are misled by spurious social and economic doctrines, part of the last 80 years' contributions to economic and social history is almost useless on account of the writer's insufficient grasp of economics. And there's where the Austrian school comes in. This is where I learned so much myself. If you read human action, there's a lot of history in that book. He had voluminous understanding, and Mises had a voluminous understanding of world history. And the same with Murray Rothbard and others. And so in one of the big problems is that the history is written by historians. And they usually know nothing at all about economics. When I first started writing about Lincoln, I was a Civil War buff. I was just sort of fascinated about what would motivate men to do what these men did in the American Civil War. And I got to reading about Lincoln and I found out that for his entire life in politics for 25 years, it was exclusively devoted to protectionism, bringing back the Bank of the United States and cronyism and the crony capitalism. He once said he wanted to be the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois, DeWitt Clinton invented the spoil system in New York, the governor of New York, and Lincoln wanted to be the big political pork marrow guy of Illinois. That's what he said as a young man. And then when he gets to be president and the official story is that well this had nothing whatsoever to do with why he was nominated or why he became president. And that sounded a little fishy to me that he would spend 25 years of his life on these things. And that was his only reputation as a politician. And of course that had nothing what to do with why he became president. And that's how I got into this. And so one of the first things I did is I wanted to see what does the history profession say about Abe Lincoln? What are these, are there official myths about that? And I found out that one of the persons that's supposed to be the expert on economics of Lincoln is a man named Gabor Borot. He was a director of the Big Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. He wins all these book awards all the time, $50,000, $35,000, I read about this. And here's what he said. He wrote an essay called The Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream. And this was all I could find at the substance of what he had to say about Lincoln and economics. Lincoln's economic policies were designed to improve everyone's standard of living. That's all I could find. What were these economic policies? Protectionist tariffs. Yeah, as John C. Calhoun once said, they want to protect us against low prices. So that's everybody said, crony capitalism, run amuck. Yeah, that's a little bit, everybody. Bringing back the central bank run by politicians, that is a good idea. Put all the money in charge of politicians, put politicians in charge of all the money. He also says, Lincoln his whole life was an advocate of deporting all the black people out of America. It was called colonization. He was the manager of the Illinois Colonization Society. They used tax dollars to deport the small number of free black people out of Illinois. And there's a book called Colonization after Emancipation published about five years ago. It shows that to his dying day, he and William Seward were counting how many ships they would need to ship all the black people out of America. And Gabor Borat is honest. He says this, he said this, I'm quoting him again. Lincoln was the leading proponent of black emigration out of the United States. Calls it emigration. It was deportated back emigration. And then, but then after that in the same book, the same book, he has a whole page of rationales for why Lincoln wanted to deport all the black people. And this is the last one that I listed in my book. And this is a direct quote from Gabor Borat in his book, The Lincoln Enigma, page 16. This is how honest people lie. When he made speeches saying we should deport the black people, he was telling honest lies. And when my book came out, I had an email from one of Gabor Borat's faculty colleagues at Gettysburg College. He said, I couldn't believe this. I thought, surely this guy is lying. I can't believe my colleague because Borat apparently was, he was held up as the stellar scholar at Gettysburg College, he wins all these awards. So this guy tells me, I went to the library and I picked up this book and sure enough, there it was, page 16. This is how honest people lie. And so what I'm saying is, when I quoted Mises and Hayek about the role of historians and being corrupted in the totalitarian system and official lies and official myths, these are examples is what I'm talking about. And if you're schooled in Austrian economics, you certainly would just brush aside and discredit the type of things he said about Lincoln and economics, that one little quote about he was a good hearted man who just wanted everyone to share and about prosperity. What politician could you say that about? It's not let alone Abraham Lincoln, anybody. Then there's James McPherson, the sort of the acknowledged dean of Civil War historians. I looked up, well, what does McPherson say if anything about economics on this? And he says, there's one passage of one of his writings. He said, Lincoln signed an astonishing blitz of laws. Most of them passed within the span of less than one year creating a capitalist revolution. And a blueprint for modern America. So he called it an amazing blitz of laws and regulations, a capitalist revolution. So if you study economics, especially Austrian economics and you understand what the economic world is about, the average citizen would not be bowled over by this, would not be fooled by this sort of thing. In one of Murray Rothbard's articles, he quotes McPherson on this Murray's article called Just War, which is online. And he's quoting, this is classic Murray Rothbard snide remark here. He said, no, this is James McPherson of Princeton saying this, negative liberty, that's these are McPherson's words, then in brackets, Murray wrote, he means liberty. What was the domination of America from constraints on individual rights imposed by a powerful state? Exactly true, that's the whole philosophy of the context. I want to say, but with some, this is James McPherson, Lincoln gained an opportunity to invoke the positive liberty. And then in brackets, Murray wrote, he means the exterior of reform liberalism. So in other words, if you read Murray Rothbard, you're not gonna be fooled by the James McPherson's of the world. And then there's David Donald, another big, big, big shot from Harvard, Lincoln Scholar. He wrote an article that was sort of a counterfactual. What if Lincoln had not been elected president? What would have happened to social policy, not slavery and all that stuff, but economic policy, social policy? Well, that would have been a bad thing. He said, that would have blocked the important economic and social legislation enacted by the Republicans. They're most likely would not have been high tariff laws. Terrible, you know, so, okay. They protected the iron industry. There would not have been a homestead act. Well, the homestead act, we now know that at least two thirds, maybe three fourths of all the free land was given to mining corporations, forestry corporations, railroad corporations. We wouldn't have had that. We wouldn't have had that. We know Transcontinental Railroad legislation and it's sort of the quasi nationalization of the Transcontinental Railroad. We would not have had that. What a terrible thing that would be. No land grant colleges. That's where the camel got its nose under the tent and created the politically correct regime that we have now, you know, government funded of education. We would not have had a department of agriculture, he writes, you know, and now that we have 150 years of central planning by the government of agriculture that has made such a mess of things with its price controls and acreage allotments and so forth. And so, when I pursued this literature of what are the leading lights of the history profession saying about economics and Lincoln, it's all just like Hayek and Misi said, they don't seem to have any understanding whatsoever of economics and yet that's what people learn about the history of the economic aspects of history from these people. And so that's why what we do here, I think with the work of the Mises Institute is so important. And by the way, Donald Trump's first speech as an economic speech that he gave was in Lexington, Kentucky because it was the home of Henry Clay, who was another protectionist, famous protectionist. A few more examples of how this goes. I have a subtitle of my notes here is Crazy Hamilton Worship. That's another icon. Ron Cherno is the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer via Play and the Hamilton Play on Broadway is supposedly based on his book, His Biography of Hamilton and he actually had a little part in it, I read. He calls Hamilton the prophet of the capitalist revolution in America. Hamilton was the author of what was called the American System, Protectionist Tariffs, Crony Capitalism, Central Banking. That's capitalism. When my book, Hamilton's Curse, came out, my publicist got me on the Morning Joe television program on MSNBC and they sat me down next to Pat Buchanan. And the first thing he says to me is, Hamilton was my hero. So I knew it was gonna be a bad day. And the three of them just kind of screamed at me for, but they did put my book on the screen and I did sell a lot of books that day from being on there. Then Ron Cherno, the prophet of the capitalist revolution, David Brooks, the Wall Street Journal writer, Hamilton single-handedly created capitalism. Historian Stephen F. Knott credits Hamilton as the founder of the America that explored the outer reaches of space, welcomed millions of immigrants, led the effort to defeat fascism and communism, produced countless technological advances and abolished slavery in Jim Crow, Hamilton, all of all Hamilton, okay. David Brooks and William Crystal, when they created what they called National Greatness Conservatism in the 90s, they said they wanted to quote, reinvigorate the nationalism of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt. That didn't really work out too well for those guys. But so the point I'm making here is that these are the kind of people who have these big, big voices in American society and very influential. And, but when they talk about economics, it's all BS because like Mises and Hayek said, they don't really understand it. Another kind of a ridiculous example, John Steele Gordon is a very well-known business historian and author and I like some of his books. But when the crash happened in 08, he blamed the whole thing, the whole crash on what he said was quote, the baleful influence of Thomas Jefferson because Jefferson opposed the Bank of the United States, the original Bank of the United States. He opposed Hamilton was for it. They had a sort of a debate between Hamilton and Jefferson in front of George Washington over whether the constitutionality of the bank. And so John Steele Gordon blamed the crash of 08, not on the Fed, which you should have, but the critics of the Fed. And then other people went and did even worse, they blamed Ron Paul. I have other articles like that. Some of my articles on newrockwell.com, with some of these New York bankers are saying, well, it's because of people like Ron Paul that the Fed doesn't have enough power. That's why we had the crash of 08. One more example I'll give, I don't have a limited time here. Although like Patrick, I spent 41 years as a university professor. So I'm programmed to speak for an hour and 15 minutes usually. Henry Clay. If you went to the Henry Clay Museum in Ashland, Kentucky, and you would see this book, Henry Clay, The Essential American, written by two historians, a man and a wife. And they say the similar things about, if you read this, you read the things they say about Clay. Now Clay was also the champion of protectionism, corporate welfare, central bank, and so forth. But hagiography, it's one of my favorite lines. If you read through books like this, Clay, he married a woman named Lucretia Hart. And they write that it's a union rumored to be mercenary on his part. So the gentlemanly, Harry Clay, poor old plain looking Lucretia Hart. They call her, they said she was plain. So it was mercenary. He took mercy on her and married her because she was plain. Then I read on and they described Lucretia as plain, wealthy Lucretia Hart. Ha, ha, ha. Abe Lincoln did the same thing. He married Mary Todd, the wealthy daughter of a Kentucky slave-owning family. Henry Clay was the owner of a large slave plantation that grew hemp in Kentucky. That's why he wanted government subsidies for the build roads and canals to transport his hemp to market. And he owned slaves and these authors of this book said, he owned slaves and continued to buy them. And then they said, while he was not a relentless pursuer of runaway slaves, he occasionally took pains to recover them. So, but he was not relentless about it. But then in the next paragraph, they said he proposed strengthening the federal fugitive slave law that would get the taxpayers to run down his runaway slaves. So that's why he didn't have to be relentless. He was in Congress and he was in the put money behind paying people, bounty hunters, to run them down so that he wouldn't have to pay to run away slaves. And they say, he owned all these slaves, he never freed any of his slaves because he liked farming too much. And I said, so what I'm saying is if you get into the historical literature on these great men, great politicians, if you look at them with an eye that is informed on a lens through which you have some economic training behind you and Murray Rothbard style libertarian philosophy that you're familiar with, it's pretty easy to break down what they're saying into dispute what they're saying on these things. And as you're all probably familiar with the famous saying by Lord Acton that power corrupts and absolute power and what is it, power corrupts? Yeah, the corrupts absolutely. The very next line is that all great men are bad men. That was Lord Acton, nobody quotes the next line, all great men are bad men. And my time is up and that's all I'm gonna say about these bad men for now.