>> will come to the 34th annual chicago tribune printers row lit fest. a special thank you to all of our sponsors. today's program will be broadcast live on c-span2 book tv. there will be time at the end of this event for some questions and answers, so think of those questions you want to ask during the program and we ask that you use the microphones located at the sides so the audience is at home can use it-- here's your questions. .. thank you for joining us for this session with bruce dole

and conservative columnist jonah goldberg. mr. goldberg's book is for people serious about reading about the political world in which we reside. those who follow his commentary understand why he sees trump is an as a pretender to reagan populism and why he believes the current challenge for conservatives is to apply reagan principles. one way to think about this book is there are many antecedents to this charged environment the didn't just happen with mr. trump. this is a patient explanation, not the paralyzing divisions we have in this society. [applause] >> thanks for braving the

chicago elements today. thank you for the argument in the book, let's go to the spoiler alert. suicide of the west, grim title, no question marks, does the patient survive? thank you for having me, thank you to all the people who showed up including all the chicago conservatives and i mean that thoroughly. not figuratively the way joe biden means literally. so one of my favorite sayings about america is it could choke on a gnat and swallow tigers whole and i'm still congenitally an optimist but the point of the title, i agree it is a grim title, not quite kick a bass with a toaster but it is close.

i didn't go spanglerian and say decline of the west. suicide of the west because i hate using the word suicide given the terrible things going on with kate spade, let's stipulate those are tragedies and all that. suicide is a choice and there's a reason the first sentence of the book is there is no god in this book and the reason i say that is not because i am an atheist, i am not an atheist but because as my dear friend charles krauthammer likes to say decline is a choice. we as a civilization and a society and democracy have the power to turn things around if we choose to do so and so just as there is no god in the book there's also no cold, impersonal forces of history, no right side of history, no --

we as a society can argue about the best policy, the best course of action. it takes persuasion and argument and passion to do it. what i'm trying to do is join in that effort and model behavior. i don't mean to be sanctimonious, eat your spinach, i paid my dues, but conservative argumentation, what i'm trying to do is a good faith effort to persuade people on the right and the left who disagree with me and show that persuasion and argument which are essential to politics can still work and it doesn't all have to be smash mouth stuff. >> the natural state of mind mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early

death. you are a funny guy in your column by the way. you got the state of affairs but then a miracle happens. >> for 250,000 years depending on whose numbers you use, since humanity split from the neanderthals, human beings everywhere the world lived on no more than $3 a day for 250,000 years, statistically 0 economic growth, all of a certain ones in human history the starts to change, starting in england, some people want to argue, holland, dutch jingoist in the room wants to fight me on this, it starts on a remote corner of western europe and starts to go like this and like

this. it is miraculous, lines get longer, people have more wealth, literacy starts to go up. every metric people claim politics is supposed to address, alleviation in poverty, improvements in public health. they start to improve not without pickups, and continuing to do this today. we live in the greatest moment of poverty alleviation in human history and in the last 30 years, hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty and not because of un programs, i'm not think we shouldn't be taking out mosquito netting and all these things but the reason we have hundreds of millions in china and india and africa

being able to eat nutritious meals, to live into old age for the first time, to read for the first time, the spread of these ideas, liberal democratic capitalism. not without problems but that is what is doing it, despite the gloomy title i tried to end up talking about the importance of gratitude, this thing that happened is not natural, poverty is natural. early death from violence is natural, what is a natural are things like democracy, human rights, property rights, capitalism, these things were invented and invented by accident which is why i call it a miracle. it is inexplicable. we don't know why it happened but we know that it did happen and it is something we should be grateful for. >> these things are happening around the world. you hear people say 1 billion

people have come out of the depths of poverty around the world and yet this plateau, their game is our loss which is to feel the political argument. >> globalization comes with a price. i don't want to say globalization and immigration in these things do not create losers, not in terms of high school, you are a loser but people who get the short end of the stick. globalization and these other powers are dislocating settled communities and settled ways of doing things. the beauty of capitalism, in a state of nature, hundreds of

thousands of years, i wanted your apples, i would hit you over the head with a rock and take your apples and with the rise of the market, all of a sudden i give you money. and they emphasize the negative. one thing capitalism is not good at is fixing any quality, everybody does get richer, some get richer faster than other people and we have a tendency in the human brain to reason people who seem to be getting a larger share than we did and income any quality really pings our tribal brains in a bad way,

the thing is communism, which tribalism originally was is really good with the unique problems any quality because it makes everybody equally poor. >> a piece i was favorable, the focus on relentless individuals, neglected the common good. >> i want to be very delicate about this. i'm a big fan of david's, grateful for the column david wrote about the book, is flatly wrong in his reading of that book. a big part of my argument is the importance of civil society, family and mediating and i do not advocate individualism, lockean individualism is a problem, one of my favorite lines, every

generation is invaded by barbarians. we call them children and anybody who has had a kid knows fundamentally, and one of the things that defines conservatism and the insight human nature has no history, took a baby from new rachelle, and a viking family, to go ponder the english countryside. if you take viking baby and sent it to new rachelle it would grow up to be an orthodontist. what i mean is babies are not born in the united states, they are born into families. families are the things that primarily, babies come with a

lot of factory preset software, there's a wonderful book by paul bloom at yale called just babies where he surveys the neuroscience on how much software babies are born with and it is amazing. babies cry from a shockingly early age with an accent. french babies have a french cry, russian babies have a russian cry, russian babies, english language babies will be attracted to the english language and distrust foreign language, almost from birth from hearing it in utero, babies bond with ethnic facial type of their parents. this gets to one of these clichés i can't stand which children have to be taught to hate. just not true. we are born with a deep distrust of strangers, and evolutionary adaptation that allowed us to pass on our genes. darwin writes about it. what we have to do is teach

people not to hate. that is one of the grading families in western civilization are supposed to do and what civilization does, takes human nature and provides software updates so we don't raise kids to be viking plunderers but good citizens in our civilization. civilization is a verb, a process. when you have the breakdown of the family, the institutions of civil society and revert back to the initial programming and we act more tribally. anyone who has done any research or looked at the role of inner-city gangs going back to the irish of the 19th century understand a big part of the reason kids join these gangs, have a sense of meaning and they do that in large part

because the other institutions in society, school, family and religion aren't doing their jobs. david missed a chapter or something, focusing on locking individuals but i do focus on individualism is for a liberal democratic nation, the sovereignty of the individual is essential when setting up the rule of law and run a greater society, and when you talk about the microcosm of the family, we are not rugged individuals. in my family i am essentially a communist. i do not charge my daughter for food. i do not put price tags on the fridge. i don't charge her rent. she is 15.

in the family it really is from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. in the macrocosm, the extended order of liberty, the greater society, operate on contract, trade, these concepts, treat people as individuals but in the family and the little platoons of life we don't do it that way. and having that right balance, the more humanitarian they need to be but the further out you get, organizing a big society and recognize individual rights individual visual liberty -- individual liberty. >> the general distrust, the return to tribalism, distrust in institutions, can't we just blame the kids for it? i think we can, lineals kids.

you cite the numbers. there is a big gap in age, distrust of capitalism, distrust of democracy, they don't believe in free-speech rights, don't know what the first amendment says, they don't leave it is unfettered. wife there that age gap, fundamental beliefs? >> a few caveats. i'm a big opponent of youth politics. i don't like generational politics. so i can't stand when people talk about the greatest generation because if you stormed normandy you deserve to never have to buy a beer again as far as i'm concerned. if you're in the drunk tank in peoria when everyone else your age was storming normandy, no transitive property said you are too great because you have the same birthday as the guys,

the same goes with millennials. marine starting businesses and all that and some millennial's out there or whatever we want to call young people today who are frittering away their lives playing call of duty on the couch and it is unfair to say they are all one or the other. there is a well-established finding and literature that says ignorance and stupidity are highly correlated with age. we are all born morons and only get over it as we get older. some of it, they used to say gen x doesn't know anything, the baby boomers, some of that is endemic to me. a bigger part of the problem as my friend ben sass says, a civics crisis in this country,

we do not teach people how the system works or how to be grateful for what they have inherited or the idea that there should be a partisan valence to the concept of free-speech is insane, a suicidal choice we are making of the culture to do that and the way we teach history so much in this country is we teach that american history or western history is only one story after another of things we should be ashamed of and a lot in our past we should be ashamed of. we should also be proud of how often we have overcome those things we are ashamed of. take slavery. slavery was a profound moral horror and properly hypocritical of the founding fathers to say all men are created equal and still have slave that not given the right to vote, i want to teach that stuff but i want to teach that stuff to show what an incredible story this country had the we overcame those

things. we are not done fixing them, we still have improvements to do. every civilization since the agricultural revolution had slavery to what extent or another. what was remarkable about western civilization particularly england was better than we were wasn't that we had slaves but we got rid of slaves. we shed blood to get rid of this evil institution and yet the way we teach so much history now, it is just our worst moment coming to define us like the mark of cain forever, and a lot of kids -- when you don't teach gratitude the opposite floods in, the opposite of gratitude is entitlement and resentment. people are taught from an early age in this country in large numbers straight through college that they are owed something from this country. that they should be resentful this country hasn't done more for them. and they should not let go of

their identity politics label. and assimilation is evil and this is a real problem and is a suicidal choice in our culture. >> a few look at the practical implication like free trade, where we come -- bill clinton was a free trader, manasseh -- nafta, obama talks like a free trader and then walked away because he saw where the nation was going and now we have a republican president who almost talks like a democrat on trade protectionism. back in the 90s, a great political cartoon when nafta passed and color-coded north and south america and mexico was labeled manufacturing in the us was labeled retail and

canada was labeled tarp. >> those guys did burn down our white house. >> a general feeling, we are the parking lot now. how do you combat that. >> that is not true. the biggest problem with it, we can talk about immigration if you want. large-scale immigration creates real dislocations in legitimate positions, "national review," we have been hawkish on restriction for a long time, walked through all of that, most of the jobs people are blaming, that we have outsourced or imported workers for, and what we have been. and require fewer people to do

it. and these robot kiosks. these aren't immigrants coming in. those are machines. blame skynet. i have a friend who is a trade expert, constantly worried he will cut himself when donald trump starts talking about trade. trade deficits are one of the great bogeyman of economic illiteracy in american life, not there isn't some instance things to be concerned about, and the investment surplus, we saw more people than import, those dollars have to come back and be invested in america because those have american

dollars. all the dollars that go abroad must come back and be spent on america. one thing that drives me batty is listen to donald trump simultaneously complain about trade deficits will also brag about investment surplus. to get rid of trade deficits we would lose a lot of investment surplus is because the seesaw, another one goes back up. and some of this simply has to do with the bad news bias we have in our culture. it is a problem in journalism and everywhere, a problem with our own brains, the caveman who hears a suspicious roar coming from the cave and says that sounds interesting, i will check it out, tended not to pass on his jeans. the one who said that sounds scary, i am not going in, tended to live another day. it is well documented finding in neuroscience, we focus on

the downside and trade is one of those things and so is immigration. we look for blood human. >> we have the republican party at war with itself over trade of all things, what is the republican party if it can have that kind of sharp disagreement? >> a wild back, it is a little unfair. radio host asked me, william f buckley recognized today's are public and pretty? the only thing that came to mind was charlton heston recognized the statue of liberty at the end of planet of the apes. recognition is not everything it is chalked up to be. it is inevitable trump is like a magnet next to a compass. all conversations go that way eventually. >> we knew that for a long time. >> we are not members of the resistance but we resisted.

the remarkable thing to me is not how we are having a war on the republican party about trade in the sense that you mean it but the reverse, that this is the first major public policy issue that a sizable number of republicans are standing up to this stuff and one of my hopes, people who know who i am know i have problems with donald trump. donald trump is a symptom of the problems we haven't is making some of them were sent some of them better i think or at least his administration is. one of the more serious structural problems we have in our country, the founding fathers never would have dreamed that the legislative branch wouldn't be a julius -- jealous guardian of its own

power. we don't have three equal branches of government. congress is supreme. it is the one that passes the laws, the one that has the power to declare war, the one that is in charge of trade. for reasons some of which have to do with the cold war, some having to do with the object sausage spine cowardice of a lot of politicians, congress has outsourced enormous amount of its responsibilities to the executive branch and the courts and the administrative state, the bureaucracy. so many people in congress do not want to be legislators. the problem with both parties, it is worse with republicans but a problem with both parties. they want to be pundits. they don't want to do anything that costs them a slot on fox and friends or morning joe. they would rather complain about something the president is doing than actually write a lot and take responsibility for it. a lot of the problems we have,

a lot of reasons we got trump, this was a problem before trump came along, barack obama ruled with a lot of executive orders, did a lot of things he himself said were unconstitutional, broke a lot of faith and confidence in the system and we have a parliament of pundits right now in congress. it is a real structural problem and one of the things i would love to see is for congress to clawback its trade authority. donald trump is imposing a lot of tariffs on the assertion that canada and our european allies pose a national security threat to us. that is just ridiculous. and he has that authority because we gave him the authority to decide what a national security threat was during the cold war. congress needs to take that back. >> if you have the white house, your agenda is set by the white

house, a chance that you think republicans in congress would try to assert that kind of authority while they are in control? >> one of the greatest disconnects in public life today is what republican congressman and senators say off the record and what they say on the record. you hear more people saying off the record and more people saying on the record that maybe we need to start clawing back some of these authorities but it is very very hard. donald trump has a real hold over a big chunk of the republican electorate and it is not a policy hold. it is a personality hold. you look at the republicans who have gotten in trouble with donald trump and it is not

because they didn't vote with him. it is because they criticized him when he said or did things they said were worthy of criticism. jeff flake, corker is resigning, leaving office, that is why steve bannon when he was in the white house wearing all the layers of clothing was trying to get rid of mitch mcconnell even though mitch mcconnell's agenda in the senate is the trump agenda. rand paul figured out the secret sauce >> and as long as trump commands a big chunk over the active debates and control of the primaries or in fox news who have the support of a lot of the activists groups, it's difficult for congressman to break the president. it's hard for congress to break with the president anyway which again is another one of the problems we have. four years ago i asked if you were a republican or democrat

i'd have to follow the question to find out whether you were a liberal or conservative. today, partisan idea is the profoundly telling label about your entire worldview in the aggregate sense and that's another part of the problem. your conservative rhetoric and the conservative thinker, what price you pay for being so critical ofdonald trump ? >> i don't call myself a never altrumper. i thought that term lost its relevance after the election. i call myself a trump skeptic. sometimes he says he'll agree with him when he doesn't agree with him. i think all of those labels are a little abit of thought but i just take the position that no offense, i know you were a grand who bought in the worldof journalism . i think most journalistic ethics is a justification for the guild that runs the columbia journalism's school

in northwestern but one of the things i take seriously is that it's part of my job not to live. i won't say things that i don't believeto be true . one of the most painful things would be to hear from longtime fans and friends who are essentially disappointed me to say i failed to live down to their expectations and they thought that once he's president or once he got the nomination i would have to fall in line and become, that's not my job. it cost me friends. it's very disruptive of what you might call my business model.coming up with a book that is not about trump but it hasfrom stuff in it would be perceived as being anti-trump . it's not a great way to sell a conservative book. >> i do o hear from leaders who talk about the press and i can't argue them about the

objectivity of news coverage. i think we do a good job on that. one area in punditry it is difficult to find a columnist of national stature who wants to defend trump. who do you most like to argue with who would qualify as a trump supporter? >> we've got a few. david hansen does some excellent work in that regard. i think that on specific issues like the fbi stuff, andy mccarthy is great. you know, there are writers at the federalist that areall in for donald trump . but i'm kind of hard-pressed. part of the problem is that if you, you know, there's

this and had journalism launched a year and a half ago that was dedicated to flushing out and defending the philosophical and the policy agenda of trump-ism and it turned into the kind of disaster because the problem is i don't think there is a consistent ideological coreto trump-ism . it is more of a psychological phenomenon and it is an ideological phenomenon and if you put your bets on saying that trump's policy is the right policy, in three or four days trump can completely reverse himself on that and if you're an intellectually consistent thinker or writer, what do you do? do you then criticized trump for changing his mind or do you defend president trump for being flexible or being you know, playing 14

dimensional chess.you get a lot of thesearguments because you can't follow a straight narrative on a lot of policy stuff . during the primaries donald trump was single-payer, he was against single-payer, he was for a lot of different things. ideologically he's like an escaped monkey from a cocaine study. it's difficult to predict what he's going to say so a lot of people are forced into the safe harbor of defending rethe man rather than coherence of policy. these remarkably consistent on trade stuff, he has been since the 1980s and not to sound like barack obama, the 1980s called and wanted its trade policy back. his decisions on the need to take the oil whatever the hell that means and beyond that you brags about the fact that he's flexible on policy issues so it's difficult for someone in my line of work to defend this idea of tropism beyond its role as a phenomenon of entertainment

or populism or sticking to the man or making these arguments that it's justifiable simply because what i call in my book ecstatic shade in freud, this tendency to think something is worth doing because it makes your enemies mad or upset. it's a problem on the left and the right so it's tough and there's some people who are better than others but it's not a genre that ti like square going to take questions in a minute, we should have a microphone loading around. with the republican party today be better off with a .wave election against the republican party? what with the outcome be? >> y?-- >> there's an old rule in politics that it's always better to win . and i certainly think the democrats take back the house

, i think it's like trying to get my dog not to chase a squirrel. we will go after impeachment. that's actually a tougher thing to game out because depending on what the underlying facts mueller and the house find, that could be seen as grave overreach during a time when the economy is doing well and it could help donald trump or if the facts lead to collusion, it could be theend of donald trump . i think as someone who's never cared much about calling himself a republican, i've always been a republican by default, i care about calling myself a conservative. i don't invest a huge amount in the fortunes of the republican party there are certainly a lot of conservatives out there who

are deciding or hoping that the republicans get routed. people like max booth, jennifer rubin and those guys who want to see the republican party destroyed because of the original sin of raising trump. i think for me personally if there's anything the last couple years has taught us it's making straight-line e political predictions about what the future holds is the surest way to get the universe to make a fool out of you. and just look at the way the last 2 and a half years have gone. if the writers of 2017 and 2018, it's like they were dropping acid. it's been crazy. by this time next year we will be remembering fondly how we did integrate us adult war soit's hard for me to predict one way or the other .

>> you mentioned congress not doing their job, their inability to legislate. how much of that howard you think you would get back if they pass appropriations bills and a full budget every year?>> i don't know if it would be step one. i think that one would be getting bloodhounds and finding that but it would be near the top of the list. the congress has lost interest in controlling the power of the purse and for structural reasons as much as anything else, both parties are more interested in running parliamentary parties where they tried to cram through what they can when they have the power and i get that and there are policies i'm glad they crowned through but we are going to get back to getting some semblance of washington working the way it's supposed to and the congress has to take ea responsibility for its role and do earrings and do appropriations, something close to the right way. >> it's an interesting

situation. we talked about trump country and i'm wondering who would vote for this guy anyway the way he acts. his inconsistency and everything else, i traveled down to kentucky for example and people down there, it's a red state and everything and there into coal mining and tobacco and bourbon. i remember the movie called deliverance and it reminds me of what trump country is all about . >> is that the question? >> we know new york is not trump country, that's where trump is from who would support this guy? who's backing him up? there's a few republicans that back him up and it's more blue-collar democrats and latin americans out in the projects. >> i'm delighted someone's

brought adog . i want more dog aspects imposed in every nook and cranny of our lives. let's be fair. i'm not sure that it's fair to say that the prototypical trump voter is a guy that says the name babies wheel like a pagan deliverance. i have friends who are trump voters in my family. at the end of the day trump did unify vast slots of the republican party because he had two important mandates. one was to not be hillary clinton and he accomplished that on day one. the other was the judges. those are the only things if you went out and you thought every republican, those are the two things they could agree on and everything else was a potential argument or

disagreement. there was a solid core of trump supporters who were the shoot them and fifthavenue people and there were others who say i don't really like him but he's better than hillary or whatever . but the, i think democrats get themselves into really bad places when they assume that if you voted for trump, you're an evil, dumb stupid redneck racist because i nk don't think that's true. i don't think hillary clinton , hillary clinton is a bad politician. i notice she's anative daughter of illinois and arkansas and new york now . >> good point. >> but that deplorable thing was a bad idea and democrats, something like 8 million people who voted for barack

obama also voted for donald trump. that alone should tell you the glib, easy, they are all racist thing is maybe a little hostile. >> i very much enjoyed your book liberal fascism, i look forward to reading your current book. a brief aside, there's an adage which i'm sure you're familiar with that conservatives think people on the left are wrong and people on the left think conservatives are evil. there are tens of millions of conservatives in this country and painting them with a 'tbroad brush doesn't serve our body politic well at all. that said my question is this. like many americans i was disheartened yesterday at the tragic news about charles krauthammer's terminal cancer and it got me thinking aside from mister trump and the other conservative pundits that i truly respect and hold in high esteem, the name that came to mind would be

elevated to mount rushmore by the conservative punditry would be krauthammer obviously, your self, victor david hanson and dennis craig . no one here really cares about that. >> i agree with 50 percent of that. but what i am interested in hearing about is, who living or dead are some of the seminal thinkers that strongly influence your conservative thought and you would put on that? >> charles for sure. i think victor or dennis, friends of both of them, my stuff was big-game by the time i started following them

but krauthammer i read from an early age. george will. william f buckley. for me, the guy that most people, he's not a household name anymore but irving kristol who was ill crystal than and a profound influence. id and abiding influence on me. i have abiding disagreements with all of them but those i thought , counsel is a big influence on me. the biggest influence was my dad. my dad was a cerebral guy. one of the reasons i love irving kristol so much was he reminded me of my dad.he had a vacation and was going from one side of the couch to the other to read a different book or magazine or going to europe to look at museums and one of his only favorite hobbies was going on long walks with his son to talk abouthow bad communism was . but those guys for sure. i could come up with other names pretty easily but you brought up charles.

i don't want to talk about him too much because it's probably a bad book to cry on c-span but the news about charles krauthammer is devastating and i know charles had this doctor strange persona on tv.he's kind of ride and stirred and good at this stuff. a more decent and humane and mentioned like human being, i'm not sure you could name. he was amazing. he's an amazing man and it is a whole that i don't think could ever be filled without him in our public life and it breaks my heart. [applause] >> you talk about people in

the republican party not getting along very well. but when we have stuff like what happened with the iran deal where the burden of proof was inverted, isn't that the kind of thing that creates a lot of infighting? >> yes, but the thing is i don't know there's anybody on my circle or republican circles who thought the iran deal wasn't either terrible on process or on policy or on ir both. that's one of the things that unifies people on the right. and i think that one of the, it's funny. a lot of liberals get furious whenever i argue or to or say that they have, and this is a big point of the book is they have their share of blame for my trump seems to like this savior for a lot of people. it's a response to identity politics and political correctness and all these things and i have my criticisms of seeing have him

as a savior but that doesn't mean those feelings were legitimate and some of the things barack obama did, he said at least four times he couldn't do daca because he wasn't thinking and when the politics seemed right to do it he did it anyway. to me that's an impeachable offense. you take an oath and you say on the record dozens of times i do not have the constitutional power to do something and that's from political expediency you do it anyway, you violated your oath of office which seems like what that's for. the way the press coverage that as if look at obama, he's owning the republicans. it spread certain amount of what i call on the right the envy where we have to use their tactics to fight the same way and there was a big sreason why trump, the way he fights, that persona was so

appealing to some people. >> we've got a long list of tufolds that still want to ask questions. the book is fascinating, congratulations.[applause] >> books can be purchased outside the auditorium . and we might be able to answer a question or two out there . >> interested in watching more of the book fairs and festivals we covered over the years? click on the book fairs and

festivals in the middle of the page. all our festival coverage can be viewed by selecting from the drop-down on the page. you can also see ellis of upcoming fares from around the country. >> what are some of the books your publishing this summer and fall? >> so nice to be here with you at the expo. we have a big book coming in a few weeks so we're very excited about that. i think the subtitle is press, politics and the president. and it's sean spicer political narrative and it comes out july 24. we are excited because it's the first time somebody has written a book who was on the campaign, in the transition team and in the white house. as sean told us, the people who run the campaign are not really the people who work in

the administration and vice versa so he was one of the few people who went all the way through and this is a area unusual white house. he became something of a lightning rod because he's the face of the administration. is the spokesperson, he's on the front line he has a really interesting story to tell and one of the fun things is he's kind of a regular guy. a nice irish catholic kid from new england who fell into this alice in wonderland world of the trump white house. and of course he's very supportive of the president and the administration but he had a tough job . it's not made easier by social media and tweets and daily stories and hour by hour stories. so that's a great book. it's called political and personal. >> what else do you have coming up?

>> we have a few other books leaning into the midterms. it's not a presidential election year but it's an election year so we like to make sure that we are talking about the things that we hope our audience is talking about, our marketplace is interested in . we have a book called fraud and it's about election, meddling in elections and as we know that's been a constant question and issue ever since the 2015 election. was there meddling from outside, from inside, who was doing what? so we have a team of reporters who wrote this book. it's the same team of reportersbehind the clinton task force . they're looking at what's going on and behind the scenes with elections and whether or not frankly we can protect the integrity of elections in this country and

there's gary things that they uncovered though that's coming out this fall. we also have books called erasing america and it's about this friend that a lot of conservatives are concerned about witches this sort of rewriting of history. erasing history. taking down statues. renaming streets and colleges and high schools and just this tendency we are seeing for people not to examine and explore and debate and understand what's happened in our past. and learn from all those things but to try to take that out of the public square which actually i think is very dangerous. i believe the old adage if you don't learn from history you are bound to repeat it.

i think a lot of people in america but certainly on the right are concerned about that so we are doing a book about examining that. we also have another book coming out with one of my favorite authors, sebastian doherty. easy use, you no doubt remember you did a big book for us years ago called defeating jihad and now he is on fox all the time, guest posting with nationally indicated radio shows and he also had a position in the white house or several months so his profile is really elevated. he's doing a book for us this fall called wiley sykes and it's about patriotism. it's about values and it's about the politically incorrect, maybe, position of saying it's okay and the fact it's essential for us to be willing to say we are the good guys.

we are fighting for something good when we are fighting. as a country, we are a force for good in the world and if we are afraid to say that, it will undermine our ability to be a force for good in the world and also undermine really the motivation and more out of our fighting forces, all of our men and women in uniform as well as cops and firemen and people who are doing things for public service if we're not willing to say we are doing something good and we are proud of doing something good and we believe in it. so it's a really interesting thing, it's an important message and its liens into some of the values that i think might be driving what happens in the midterms.

>> we are here at the public publishers convention. republican president in the white house. how's business for conservative publishing? >> used to always say, we used to say what's good for regular he is was bad for america and what's bad for america be good for us. we meant we were the party we were not the party in office. when a conservative wasn't in office, we can do better. so when we thought about how do we publish in the president trump , we were a little worried candidly that that might be a challenge to our book and our audience but i think one of the benefits for political publishers like regnery in this administration is that people are very engaged in what's going on in the political landscape. people are interested and it becomes a source of entertainment as well as news .

that helps make sure that our market and our audience is still engaged, still interested in political points of view. and still feel a need to understand what's going on in washington and in the world and to help navigate the different issues and trends that are popping up every day and i think we know that there's a surface of information and opinions and it's great to have a lot of information but it's also confusing and i think when people are confused, there is a great opportunity for books and authors to step in and say let me try to explain this. let me put this in a frame of reference, put this in context. so whether it's a conservative or liberal in the white house, as long as people still need help

figuring out how to understand and process what's going on, there's a place for our booksquick quick updates from regnery and the books they have coming up . but dv did a profile of regnery publishing. if you go to booktv.org and type in regnery and the books, you will be able to watch the entire profile. this is tv on c-span2. >> at a recent judicial conference, chief justice john roberts shared his summer reading list. >> as far as things to read, i can tell you what i'm looking forward to reading . i got as a christmas present a book called why bob dylan matters. it's written by a harvard professor who studied his poetry and i think it sounds like it's going to be very good. this would be on the serious

level, not the entertaining level. and jeff rosen has written a new biography of william howardtaft and i hear it's good but it's like . and i think it's quickly paste enough that you don't get bogged down in it. and joanna breyer has written a book called i think it's when your child is sick or something like that. she's worked in pediatrics for children who have serious diseases, cancer and all that and i think it's a very important book. your child doesn't have to be set to read it. it makes interesting connections between parenting advice and things like how do you tell a sibling that their

brother or sister isseriously ill. what you can do to make that process go better. and i started in on that and i think it's going to be great to finish . >> send us your summer reading list at instagram or facebook. book tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. >> ladies and gentlemen, i was -- i was for the iraq invasion but i am against the cuban embargo. i've supported capital