""September 11, 1777." ""My loving wife," ""these past few months away from you and Nathaniel have been difficult," ""and I miss both of you terribly." ""We have all made sacrifices, starting with our commander." ""We face the most powerful army in the world." ""In our last battle we felt the bite of their artillery."" "Fire!" ""But we held firm and pushed them back." ""Our commander did not let us fail." ""We trust him." "He keeps our spirits high."" "Battalion, attention!" ""General Washington reminds us" ""that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" ""are our unalienable rights and we will not give them up to the crown." ""When the war is won, America will be the first nation" ""to freely choose its own way." ""Today will be another test of our will as we face General Howe," ""whose troops outnumber us by the thousands." ""The American cause now rests on providence and General Washington."" "Hold the line, boys!" "Hold the line!" "Ready, fire!" "Fire!" "Fire!" "Charge!" "General Washington!" "Fall back!" "Retreat!" "Fall back!" "Retreat!" " Advance!" " Retreat!" "Fall back, company!" "Imagine the unimaginable." "What if George Washington had been killed by a sniper's bullet?" "What if the Civil War had torn this country into two or 10 countries?" "What if Hitler got the atomic bomb first?" "What would the world look like if America did not exist?" "From farmers in the fields to the tallest of the towers that fall and rise" "1-7-7-6, the names upon the list of all the ones who gave until they died" "Don't you hold back" "I can see in your mind and your mind will set you free" "Rise to the top of the world" "America" "America, don't you cry" "Lift me up" "Give me strength to press on" "Rise to the top of the world" "America" "America, don't you cry" "Lift me up" "Give me strength to press on" "Rise to the top of the world" "I love America." "I chose this country." "America, don't you cry" "And like millions of immigrants, I've been blessed by my life in America." "Give me strength to press on" "This country does something truly unique." "It allows you to write the script of your own life." "A chapter of my script was making the film 2016." "It surprised Hollywood and the media by becoming a runaway hit." "It became the number two political documentary film of all time." "In the film I made three predictions." "The federal government would grow bigger as America's role in the world grows smaller." "Under President Obama, the national debt would double." "This administration would undermine our allies and strengthen our enemies." "Seeing these predictions come true, I'm scared for the future of America." "But I believe we can be strong again unless we choose another path." "A century and a half ago, a young Abraham Lincoln issued a prophetic warning." "Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us with a blow?" "Never." "All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined with a Bonaparte for a commander could not by force take a drink from the Ohio." "At what point then, is the approach of danger to be expected?" "I answer that if it ever reach us, it must spring up from amongst us." "It cannot come from abroad." "If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be the author and finisher of it." "As a nation of freemen, we must live throughout all time or die by suicide." "How do you convince a great nation to author its own destruction?" "You start by telling a new story." "'Cause if you got a business, you didn't build that." "Somebody else made that happen." "What President Obama is really saying is that the wealth and abundance of American life are not earned, they're stolen." "But it's not just President Obama." "Thievery was a critical element to the expansion of American empire." "This is a nation founded on genocide and built on the backs of slaves." "Moving borders." "They call it American imperialism." "Obama didn't create this movement." "It created him." "Not God bless America." "God damn America." "European expansion, conquest, colonization, genocide." "American foreign policy has been aggressive and imperialist for a very long time." "It was expansionist immediately starting right after the Revolutionary War." "Incredible as it may seem, there are people in America who want a world without America." "Their indictments against America start at the very beginning." "What are the words that come to mind when you hear the phrase, Christopher Columbus?" "I know your name." "What's your unit?" "Lieutenant Colonel John Fer of the United States Air Force." "And ends 400 years later in America with the Trail of Tears where 18,000 Native Americans were forced to march 2,000 miles, leaving a third of them dead." "What words come to mind when you think of the word "America"?" "A sadness." "For me, it's just a great sadness." "I think of all the hundreds of nations that were destroyed." "In 1845, Mexican territory covered most of Texas," "New Mexico, Arizona and California." "I like Chicano nationalism." "I really do prefer Hispanic culture to Anglo-Saxon culture." "And you say, "Well, why don't you move back to Mexico?"" "I don't have to." "I'm in Mexico." "And like I tell my Chicano students, maybe after there isn't a United States, we'll still be here, like the Indians." "So to put it biblically, you are in America but not of America." "I'm not of America, no." "Charles Truxillo is a professor of Chicano studies at the University of New Mexico." "He's a leading representative of a movement trying to reclaim Mexico's lost lands." "Did the United States steal half of Mexico in the Mexican War?" "Yes, and the wealth of those areas." "California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, the oil, the minerals, would have made Mexico a premier economic power, like it's becoming now." "When I went one time with my father to Mexico to visit relatives, we were in an old classroom and they had a map of North America up in the classroom." "And it had the area that's the American Southwest from Texas to California cross-thatched with the colors of Mexico and the United States, and they had named that area provincias perdidas, lost provinces." "They have killed us, beat us, drugged us, knocked us and raped us and robbed us." "Done everything but the right thing." "We don't see any American dream." "We've experienced only the American nightmare." "We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear." "Well, obviously as a black person in America, it's, um, a part of the wretched history of this nation that my foremothers and forefathers were not seen as fully human." "I spoke to the African American scholar Michael Eric Dyson at Georgetown University." "Has Obama's election and re-election..." "Doesn't that say something about the end of racism?" "I would not deny at all that American has made enormous progress." "Are we there yet?" "No." "America doesn't want to confront the vicious inequalities that it set loose in this nation." "Absorbing things that are not yours." "Taking stuff that is not yours." "We can say thievery was a critical element to the expansion of American empire and the establishment of the American way of life." "150 years ago at the height of slavery, another man made an even more passionate indictment of America." "The American slave, what is your 4th of July?" "I answer a day that reveals to him more than all other days in a year, a gross injustice." "Your celebration is a sham." "You profess to believe that of one blood God made all nations and hath commanded all men everywhere to love one another." "Yet, you notoriously hate and glory in your hatred all men whose skin are not colored like your own." "Meet Frederick Douglass." "Born a slave, he escaped to freedom and became a champion of the antislavery movement." "You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a three-penny tax on tea and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country." "There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, than on this 4th of July." "We like to think of ourselves as a peace-loving people." "If they said, "We're going in for the oil," we'd say, "No, don't do it."" "But instead they say, "We're going in for democracy."" "Has the United States been a force for good or ill in the world?" "For the people we conquer, the Vietnamese, we killed a couple million of them, not a force for good." "MIT professor Noam Chomsky is a leading critic of American imperialism." "There's a reason why most of the world regards the United States as a predatory colonial power." "We overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala in 1954," "Iran in 1953, Cuba in 1961." "Then Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, on through the world." "It's not a pretty record." "We are the 99%!" "Whose street?" "Our street!" "Occupy Wall Street!" "We've never had anything like this in this country where we take on economic issues like this." "If you want money, after you get that million, you want a billion." "After you get a billion, you want a trillion." "After you get a trillion, you want a zillion." "There is no end." "There is no line." "The charge against capitalism is that greedy, selfish business owners steal from people." "They create gross inequality by depriving people of their fair share." "And it's only right that we ask everyone to pay their fair share." "Asking everyone to pay their fair share." "Pay their fair share." "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own." "Nobody." "You built a factory out there." "Good for you." "But I want to be clear, you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for." "You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate." "You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for." "It doesn't matter whether you're making profits from a hot dog stand in Times Square or if you're the biggest company on NASDAQ, capitalists are under fire." "Until we change the system, and let's use the C word here." "We're talking about capitalism." "If it's a more comfortable word for you, greed." "That's just another word for it." "This ultimately has to change." "How much more are you going to make them suffer?" "Because some day they're not gonna take it anymore." "These are the indictments against America." "We stole the country from the Native Americans." "We took half of Mexico in the Mexican War." "We stole the labor of the African Americans." "And today our foreign policy and our free market system are forms of theft." "These indictments developed separately and each has been around for a long time." "But now they've come together in a single narrative of American shame." "One professor pulled this narrative together." "His name is Howard Zinn." "I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks." "Of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves." "Of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees." "Matt Damon and Ben Affleck grew up in the same" "South Boston neighborhood as Zinn." "They gave him a nice plug in their movie Good Will Hunting." "You want to read a real history book, read Howard Zion's People's History of the United States." "That book will knock you on your ass." "Zion's book has made him quite the celebrity." "What I didn't realize is that from the very beginning, from when Columbus met the Arawaks, there was..." "It was just nonstop, um, violence and, uh, and, uh, just taking over." "They're bullying people and taking over their resources." "Howard Zinn is the most influential historian of the past 50 years." "His book has sold over two million copies, becoming required reading in most colleges and many high schools." "Even Tony Soprano's kid had to read it." "His history teacher, Mr. Cushman, is teaching your son that if Columbus was alive today, he would go on trial for crimes against humanity, like Milošević in, you know, Europe." "Your teacher said that?" "It's not just my teacher." "It's the truth." "It's in my history book." "This is the new story of American shame." "Are our lives, innocent on the surface, part of a ruthless engine of looting, exploitation and murder?" "It's a powerful critique." "We can't just dismiss it with chants of liberty, freedom, rah, rah, rah." "The critics are raising the primary question of justice." "...with liberty and justice for all." "Read the Declaration of independence." "It's a cry against injustice." "For the American founders, liberty was the solution to that injustice." "This is not just an attack on the 1%." "It's an attack on all of us." "We are a nation of immigrants and settlers." "And we are the ones accused of these crimes." "If these things are true, something has to be done about them." " There he is." " How's it going?" " Good." "Come on in." " Good to see you." " Been a while, hasn't it?" " It has been." "Reagan had called the Soviet Union, you remember, an evil empire." " Yeah." " And the Soviet Union has dissolved." "So, who's the new evil empire?" "Well, you're sitting in it." "One of the most vocal critics of America is Professor Ward Churchill." "He gained notoriety right after 9/11 by suggesting some of the people in the World Trade Center were like Nazi war criminals and deserved what they got." "If the US had the atomic bomb earlier, chances are pretty good it would have dropped it on Nazi Germany, and certainly, for a Jew, that would be a good idea because to destroy an evil regime is a good thing." "Yeah." "So if you could drop a bomb on the United States, would you do it?" "Well, if it would be justifiable in the context you just described, then by the same logic, it would be justifiable here." "It's not one set of rules for everybody else and another set of rules for the United States." "That is American suicide." "But there is an alternative remedy for this theft and injustice." "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." "To remake America you have to unmake the America that's here now." "You are about to witness the very exciting story of a city and its people." "It is the story of a city seeking new horizons." "Yes, Detroit is enjoying its finest hour." "Obama's remaking involves economic redistribution never before imagined." "It's aimed at returning centuries of stolen goods." "Detroit was once the richest city in the world, the pinnacle of America." "If America goes the way of Detroit, that would be another kind of suicide." "But is suicide the price we must pay for justice?" "If our wealth is stolen, then we must give it back." "So, is America guilty as charged?" "It depends on whether the story of American shame is true or not." "I came from India to America 30 years ago." "I know a world without her." "When I hear young people on the campus repeat the Zinn narrative of American shame," "I know they haven't been told the whole story." "Is Howard Zinn a real historian?" "No, Howard Zinn is not a real historian." "He constantly has misstatements of fact." "More than misstatements, actual proven untruths, and he doesn't care that it's inaccurate." "Professor Ron Radosh is a leading scholar of American radicalism and a contemporary of Howard Zinn." "Now, you used to be a member of the US Communist Party." "Right, I left it because I realized that the ideology and the practice had no relation to American reality." "Howard Zinn left because it was not revolutionary enough." "What he does is try to create a glossary of radical heroes who the new movement he wants to build should emulate." "That's why he's writing this book." "He was writing to try and inspire a social movement among young people who would act as revolutionaries." "That's his purpose, not history." "I got into history with a very, sort of, modest objective." "Uh, I wanted to change the world." "If you read his book," "America is the single most oppressive nation in the world." "America is intrinsically evil." "He wants us to understand how bad America is." "And then, we will join him in creating a new social revolutionary movement." "If Howard Zinn gives us a twisted picture of America, is there a more reliable source?" "Meet Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who traveled through America in 1831 and wrote the classic book Democracy in America." "Tocqueville witnessed America first-hand." "He saw the founding principles in action." "He saw Americans as very entrepreneurial." "Choose any American at random and he could be enterprising, adventurous, and above all, an innovator." "Tocqueville observed how no one bows or scrapes before another in America." "America is the only country where we call the waiter "sir,"" "as if he were a knight." "Tocqueville witnessed the importance of Christianity." "He saw faith shaping not only people's inner life, but also their political life." "He wrote, "Religion must be regarded as the first of their political institutions." ""When a private individual meditates an undertaking," ""he never thinks of soliciting the cooperation of the government." ""Rather, he does it himself or in collaboration with others."" " God bless you, sir." " God bless you." ""In the end, the sum of these private undertakings" ""far exceeds all that the government could have done."" "Now, Tocqueville did recognize the things that Zinn talks about." "At one point, Tocqueville stood on the Ohio-Kentucky border." "He looked north and he saw industrious Ohio." "He looked south and he saw idle Kentucky." ""On both sides," he commented, "the soil is equally fertile." ""The situation just as favorable."" "So what explained the difference?" ""Slavery," Tocqueville said, "degrades work." ""It produces a people without energy, without a spirit of enterprise." ""Slaves have no incentive to work" ""because they don't get to keep the fruit of their labor."" "Thank you all for coming out to auction today." ""And masters become lazy because there are slaves" ""to do everything for them."" "We're gonna sell them here 'cause they are ready to work." "We're gonna start this auction off with this strapping young buck right here." "This one right here is fresh out of the water." "We're gonna open this auction up at $200." "Do I have $200?" "Who's gonna bid 300?" "Who's gonna bid 300?" "When Tocqueville saw slavery, when he saw the treatment of the Native Americans, he knew none of this was uniquely American." "In fact, it was part of a universal conquest ethic." "Most countries are founded in conquest." "Europe, conquest, conquest and more conquest." "Look at Britain." "Before becoming an empire, it was conquered by the Norman kings of France and earlier by the Romans." "Before the British came, India was invaded by the Persians, the Mongols, the Afghans, the Arabs and Alexander the Great." "Conquest was how wealth was acquired." "Not through entrepreneurship, invention or business." "Historically, every culture has despised entrepreneurs and merchants." "In India, we have the caste system." "Who's at the top?" "The Brahmin or priest." "The entrepreneur is one step from the bottom." "The Islamic historian Ibn Khaldūn says that looting is morally preferable to entrepreneurship or trade." "Why?" "Because looting is more manly." "In looting, you have to beat the guy in open combat to take his stuff." "America is based on a different idea." "The idea of acquiring wealth not by taking it from someone else." "Instead, wealth can be created through innovation, entrepreneurship and trade." "Let's take a look at Manhattan." "Reportedly in 1626," "Native Americans sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $700 in today's money." "There's land all over the world now that you can buy for $700." "But when the Dutch bought Manhattan, there was no Manhattan." "Prices are astronomical today because of what's been built over the past 300 years." "Manhattan is the creation of the people who built it, not the original inhabitants who sold it." "Manhattan represents the new American ethic of wealth creation." "An alternative to conquest." "It's time to respond to Zion's story of American shame." "Did America steal the country from the Native Americans?" "Much of this critique focuses on Columbus and the actions of the Spanish conquistadors." "But Columbus never even landed in America." "And the actions of the Spanish, that was 150 years before America." "Zinn blames America for the sins of the Spanish and the Portuguese and Great Britain and France." "What about all the broken treaties since 1776?" "Well, the very idea of a treaty is a departure from the conquest ethic." "The conquest ethic was very simple, you win, I lose." "This is not a defense of relocation or the way the Native Americans have been treated." "Some restitution is due." "And some has been made." "In the case of the Black Hills, American courts acknowledge the land was taken in violation of the Laramie Treaty of 1868." "$1 billion, fair market value of the land plus interest, has been set aside." "But the Sioux have rejected it." "They want the land." "But is it their land?" "In the late 1700s, the Sioux took that land from the Cheyenne, who had earlier pushed out the Kiowa and the Arapaho." "Land possession is part of a long history in which the stronger Native American tribes displaced weaker ones." "The Native Americans, too, subscribe to the conquest ethic." "But what about the charge of genocide?" "In the two centuries after Columbus, the Native American population declined by 80%." "But it wasn't due to warfare." "Rather, as historian William McNeill points out, they contracted diseases, measles, typhus, smallpox, cholera and malaria, to which they had no immunities." "Now, this is tragedy on a grand scale, but it's not genocide because genocide implies an intention to wipe out a people." "Just a century and a half earlier, one-third of the population of Europe was wiped out by a series of bubonic and pneumonic plagues." "Those plagues came from Asia, and the Europeans had no immunities." "We don't call that genocide." "I understand the pain of Charmaine White Face and others over the loss of an old way of life, but the Native Americans, if they wanted, can return to that way." "Instead, they have exercised the right of tribal self-government and many have chosen to build resorts, casinos and other entrepreneurial businesses." "Did America steal half of Mexico in the Mexican War?" "It seems cruel." "We took the land of these Mexicans and now we won't even allow them to come back and work as laborers on land that used to be theirs." "I asked Texas Senator Ted Cruz what started the Mexican War." "What prompted the Texas Revolution, the Texians, who were part of Mexico at the time." "General Santa Anna, who was the dictator in Mexico, began stripping away the rights of Texians." "And indeed, they began to revolt to protect their freedom and independence." "And so the Texians fought a revolution, just like our founding fathers in America did, and won their independence from Mexico." "Texas joined the American union, and its border dispute with Mexico precipitated the Mexican War." "America won that war." "As a result, American troops were in Mexico City." "We took all of Mexico." "Then we retired its debt and gave half the country back." "The people who ended up on the American side of the border were made American citizens." "Temo Muniz is a law student active in Hispanic politics." "Would you consider yourself Mexican American?" "Mexican is the adjective." "American is the noun." "I am a proud Texan born and raised." "I'm an American of Mexican heritage." "Do you believe in the American dream?" "Definitely." "I've seen it first-hand." "My dad was a shepherd boy from the mountains of San Luis Potosí Mexico." "He pretty much bootstrapped his way to building one of the largest manufacturing companies in his industry sector." "Like I said, we started from the bottom." "We had, uh, nothing." "Uh, dumpster diving to sell things, to resell things." "Selling chips at the park at the age of six." "Collecting cans." "Unloading cotton bales at the age of 13." "So, I've witnessed it." "I've lived it." "And I know the American dream is alive." "What is your American dream?" "Well, I'm still in search of it." "I'm in law school right now." "And I hope to really be an influence to my community." "We're cut from the same cloth as any American who has a pioneer spirit." "What would your life be like today if you were in Mexico?" "If we had the same American dream in Mexico, we'd probably be extorted by the cartel kingpins." "Asking us for 10%, 20% of the fruits of our labor." "We wouldn't even have the natural right to bear arms to defend ourselves against the cartels." "It's hard to build any kind of dream when you're living under tyranny." "I've heard of las provincias perdidas, the lost provinces." "The truth of the matter, Dinesh, is that we don't care about that." "We're here in America." "We're building up the American dream." "We're successful." "We've tasted freedom and liberty." "We're not going back." "What would you do if the American Southwest were somehow to be returned to Mexico?" "Uh, I'd be moving to Minneapolis." "So you'd want to stay in America?" "America is where I was born and Texas is where I'm gonna die." "And he's not alone." "How long have you been in border control law enforcement?" "Dinesh, I was a border patrol agent on the border for 26-plus years." "Now, how many people would you say in a year surreptitiously cross the border?" "Probably in the millions." "And these are people obviously crossing from the United States into Mexico." "No, they're people crossing from Mexico into the United States." "Yes." "But don't you have Mexican Americans who are trying to cross back into their old country?" "Uh, I've never seen one illegally try and cross back into Mexico, no, never." "They prefer it here?" "Obviously." "I wonder how many people in Mexico today wish the United States had kept all of Mexico." "The enslavement of African Americans was theft." "Theft of life and labor." "Were the American founders hypocrites in affirming that all men are created equal while approving a constitution that allowed slavery to continue?" "This was debated by the Republican Abraham Lincoln and his Democratic opponent." "So if you desire Negro citizenship, if you desire to let them move into our state to settle with the white man, then by all means, support Mr. Lincoln and the black Republican party who are for Negro citizenship." "The authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men." "They did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects." "They did not mean to say that all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments or social capacity." "They define with tolerable distinctness in what respect they did consider all men created equal." "Equal in certain inalienable rights." "Among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." "They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying this equality." "Nor yet that they were about to confer them immediately upon them." "They simply meant to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit." "Lincoln recognized that the founders could not have outlawed slavery and still had a union." "No Southern state would have joined such a union and slavery might have lasted much longer." "Earlier in his career, Frederick Douglass had called Lincoln the white man's president." "There was a movement in America supported by many blacks and even by Lincoln to relocate blacks to Africa." "But meeting Lincoln restored Douglass' faith in America." "Douglass condemned that movement." "He didn't want to leave America, nor did he want to destroy America." "He wanted to participate in America." "He wanted to make this country his home." "Now, take the Constitution." "According to its plain reading," "I defy the presentation of a single proslavery clause in it." "On the other hand, it will be found to contain principles and purposes entirely hostile to the existence of slavery." "I do not despair at this country." "There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery." "For the first time in history, a great war was fought to end slavery." "300,000 Northern soldiers died in that war." "They died to secure for the slaves a freedom that the slaves were not in the position to secure for themselves." "Even the Civil Rights Movement was not a break with the American founding." "In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check." "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of independence, they were signing a promissory note" "To which every American was to fall heir." "Where did Martin Luther King get his promissory note?" "Not from the segregationists." "He got it from the Declaration of independence." "It was the American founding that established the principles that made possible the success of the Civil Rights Movement." "The topic of race, more than any other, generates taboos." "And taboos are the enemy of history and of truth." "In the early 17th century when slavery started in America, another group was brought to this country by force." "They were white indentured servants." "Starting in 1618, children were captured from the streets of London and sold into colonial America." "But it didn't stop there." "Over the next century and a half, another 150,000 Irish men, women and children were declared soldiers of war by Britain and sold into colonial indentured servitude with many landing in Virginia and New England." "Indentured servitude was not slavery." "It didn't have the same ideology of racial dehumanization." "And it was for a limited period, typically seven years." "Yet, these people often had their term extended or died before they got their freedom." "Indentured servants worked side by side with slaves." "For many years, white indentured servants outnumbered black slaves." "Our next story, one you won't find in Howard Zinn, is set in South Carolina," "where we encounter one of the most feared plantation owners in the South." "Meet William Ellison." "Born himself into slavery, Ellison was freed as a young man." "He became a blacksmith, then a mechanic for cotton gins." "And then went into farming where he eventually owned 1,000 acres and 60 slaves." "He was also known as a slave breeder, a practice shunned even by most white slave owners." "That's a fine young one for you." "When the Civil War broke out, Ellison supported the Confederacy, investing in Confederate bonds and supplying food and provisions for the Confederate army." "Ellison's story is told by the African American scholar" "Henry Louis Gates." "Gates and other scholars estimate that in the period before the Civil War, there were approximately 3,500 free blacks who owned more than 10,000 black slaves." "In South Carolina and Louisiana," "Gates points out, the percentage of free blacks who owned slaves was approximately the same as the percentage of whites who owned slaves." "These episodes illustrate the universality of the conquest ethic and the uniqueness of the American response to it." "Slavery existed all over the world." "The Egyptians had slaves." "The Chinese had slaves." "The Africans did." "American Indians had slaves long before Columbus." "And tragically, slavery continues today in many countries." "What's uniquely Western is the abolition of slavery." "And what's uniquely American is the fighting of a great war to end it." "Zinn wants a narrative of American shame." "That's why he leaves these stories out." "And that's why we have a moral obligation to put them back in." "And here's someone else who gets left out of Zinn's narrative." "Good afternoon." "I'm Madam Walker and this is my daughter Lelia." "Meet Sarah Breedlove, also known as Madam C.J. Walker." "She started selling her own hair care products door to door." "Madam C.J. Walker became the first self-made female millionaire in America." " They're ready for you." " Thank you." "Good morning, madam." "Good morning, ladies." "Get back to work." "See, ladies, you don't have to define yourself by your current station in life." "But only by your vision of who you can become." "Yes." "Yes." " Today you see a success." " Yes." "And I hear many of you say, "But, Madam Walker," ""I just don't have the opportunities you had."" "And I respond, "Really?"" "I was the first freeborn in my family." "Orphaned at age seven." "Married at 14 and widowed with child by 20." "Mmm-hmm." "I'm a woman that came from the cotton fields of the South." "Yes." "From there, I was promoted to the washtub." "From there, I was promoted to the cook kitchen." "Uh-huh." "From there, I promoted myself to the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations." "Yes!" "I have built my own factory on my own ground." "I got my start by giving myself a start." "Ladies, there is no flower-strewn path to success." "And if there is, I haven't found it." "If I've accomplished anything in my life, it's because I was willing to work hard." "You can do something new today." "And don't be too haughty." "You can always go to that washtub for a seat." "What a role model." "So why is she left out of the history books?" "Because she confounds the shame narrative." "She's an African American success story." "In a way, she sounds like Martin Luther King." "King once said, "Every man must write with his own hand" ""the charter of his Emancipation Proclamation." ""We are all in this country a minority of one" ""and how we succeed or fail depends on our efforts."" "Did America get rich by simply stealing from other countries?" "Starting with the Vietnam War, another charge surfaced," "America the imperialist." "We will build a revolutionary youth movement capable of actively engaging in the war against the imperialists." "We will escalate our attacks until imperialism is defeated in Vietnam." "That was Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground." "He bombed the Pentagon and says he wished he could have done more." "He's now a college professor." "And who are his agents of American imperialism?" "Meet John Fer." "I always adored flying." "And I built and flew model airplanes since I was five years old." "And so eventually become a pilot in the Air Force." "But things didn't work out so well for John Fer." "And they blew the airplane out of the sky." "I landed on the ground and then I was marched off to the interrogation room." "I was absolutely shocked at the threshold that I had to cry uncle." "I wanted to turn off the pain." "Why did you go to Vietnam?" "I believed that we were doing the right thing of helping the South Vietnamese stand on their own two feet, so that one day then we could extract ourselves and we would have a free South Vietnam." "I was there to give opportunity for the South Vietnamese people to exercise their own destiny." "John Fer would spend the next six years in the famed POW prison, the Hanoi Hilton." "I came home to a different America." "Whatever you think about the Vietnam War," "America wasn't stealing from the Vietnamese." "And in Iraq, we spent a whole bunch of money and then we turned over the oil fields to the Iraqis." "Under the conquest ethic, we would have kept it." "In Afghanistan after 9/11, the US military, even while bombing terrorist targets, was delivering food rations to Afghan civilians." "And far from stealing, America rebuilt Germany and Japan after World War ll." "Contrary to the Zinn narrative, we're not the bad guys of the world." "As Colin Powell said," ""The only land that America asks for abroad is land to bury our dead."" "Finally, capitalism." "Does it rip off the consumer?" "Welcome to Delish Dinesh." " Can I help you?" " I'll take a hamburger." "$1.95." "Maria just paid $1.95 for that hamburger." "Ek burger jaldi banao." "But the cost of me making the hamburger, with food, labor, rent, insurance, advertising, permits..." "Hey, boss, soda machine broken again." "...equals $1.79." "Leaving me with a whopping 8% or 16 cent profit." "The best way to judge if I'm ripping her off is to see what it would cost for her to make the burger at home." "Maria's burger has the same stuff as Delish Dinesh." "But when you add it up, Maria's homemade burger costs $2. 22." "That's 27 cents more than the burger at my restaurant." "And that doesn't even factor in the time that it cost her to make it." "Does this work for the big companies, too?" "And we are calling it iPhone." "Steve Jobs, did he rip people off?" "He created products that people didn't even know they wanted or needed." "But once he made them available, they clamored for them and stood in line to buy them and freely spent their money for them." "There's no rip-off." "Capitalism works not through coercion or conquest, but through the consent of the consumer." "To see why there's so much inequality, consider the example of Zinn's own disciple Matt Damon." "Here he is in The Bourne Ultimatum." "Here he is in The Bourne Identity." "How does Matt Damon make so much more money than you?" "Is it because he works harder than you putting in an intense six weeks filming to earn several million dollars?" "Could it be because of his unbelievable skills?" "Please." "There's only one reason Matt Damon makes so much money." "The consumers who buy tickets to his movies." "In other words, you." "You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for." "You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate." "You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for." "Is Senator Warren right?" "Entrepreneurs and business owners do use public services, but so does everyone else." "Let's say, a successful business owner makes four times as much as the average employee." "But she also pays four times as much in taxes." "Do her kids get four times more attention in public school?" "Does she get to drive four times as fast on the freeway?" "Will the fire department arrive four times faster?" "No." "Not at all." "What about the rest of the world?" "Does capitalism promote global injustice?" "From businesses in the Middle East to factories in South America to entrepreneurs in China, the world is embracing the free market." "Does it seem to you ironic that this sort of entrepreneurial capitalism, that this recipe has become so controversial at home here while it is being enthusiastically embraced in so many other parts of the world?" "I spoke to Jagdish Bhagwati, a professor of economics at Columbia University and a leading researcher on global capitalism." "How many people have been lifted out of poverty in India?" "Over 200 million people are, you know, in less than 15 years, have pulled out of poverty." "And in China the number is even greater." "Far greater." "It's about 400 to 500 million people." "'Cause they started earlier." "Capitalism, entrepreneurial capitalism is the most important moral case." "So there's no reason for us to be apologetic." "It's the other guys who should be apologetic." "'Cause every bit of experience shows that they're the ones who really undermine the fortunes of the poor." "And when it comes to helping the poor through charity, you may be surprised at who cares the most." "Meet Arthur Brooks, head of the American Enterprise institute." "One of the things that we typically find in our modern conversation about who's charitable is that folks who believe in greater government transfers, more income redistribution, they believe they're the most charitable members of society." "When you look at the data, a different picture emerges." "What we really find is that folks who are on the conservative side, especially the religious conservative side, give away the most." "About four times as much." "About four times as much of their resources as people who are on the secular left." "And if you're struggling in America, is it still possible to pull yourself up?" "I believed that my problems were somebody else's fault." "I believed that America was so inherently racist that I didn't need to mainstream." "And I believed that the poor were poor because the wealthy were wealthy." "I met with my friend Star Parker." "You were on welfare for how long?" "I was in and out seven years, but three-and-a-half years consistently." "Did it ever occur to you to go looking for work and if not, why not?" "Why bother?" "Why would I go out and find work when somebody else was willing to send me a check on the 1st and the 15th?" "My life go in a little black hole." "And that's where I was living." "When some people looked me in the eye and pointed their finger in my face and told me my lifestyle was unacceptable to God, and when they said that, I didn't even know there were churches, but there was something about their conviction that got my attention." "I finally went to church with them and heard the gospel and I changed and I went back to college." "I got a degree." "I started a business." "And now I run an organization today and am a nationally syndicated columnist and an author." "For me, Star Parker is the quintessential American." "She draws on those classic American virtues that Tocqueville talked about, individual initiative, community, faith, to help herself and others." "So is the wealth of America based on theft?" "Actually, no." "The wealth of America isn't stolen, it's created." "All right, this way." "This way." "The ethic of conquest is universal." "What's uniquely American is the alternative, equal rights, self-determination and wealth creation." "If America did not exist, the conquest ethic would dominate the world once again." "America isn't the problem." "America is the answer." "Tocqueville knew that." "I know it." "And so does U2's Bono." "It's not a right-left issue." "It's a right-wrong issue." "And America has constantly been on the side of what's right." "Because when it comes down to it, this is about keeping faith with the idea of America." "Because America is an idea, isn't it?" "I mean, Ireland is a great country, but it's not an idea." "Great Britain is a great country." "It's not an idea." "That's how we see you around the world." "As one of the greatest ideas in human history." "Right up there with the Renaissance." "Right up there with crop rotation and the Beatles' White Album." "You and me are created equal." "If we have dignity, if we have justice, then leave it to us, we'll do the rest." "This country was the first to claw its way out of darkness and put that on paper." "These aren't just American ideas anymore." "There's no copyright on them." "You brought them into the world." "These truths, your truths, they're self-evident in us." "But now we turn to a political question." "If America is a force for good, why are they trying to make us feel bad?" "Who's behind this?" "The shaming of America is not accidental." "It's part of a strategy." "This becomes a contest of power." "Now, power has always gone into two areas, those who have money and those who have people." "We have nothing but people." "If an organizer doesn't have any idea what to do about it, he hasn't got any damn business being in there." "Do I make myself clear?" "Who was Saul Alinsky?" "Saul Alinsky was a man of the left, and very far to the left." "To pin it down, he was a democratic socialist." "Meaning that he wanted the United States to become a socialist country, but he was willing to see that happen slowly through the democratic process." "You tell them that I'm meeting with my staff and with the fight leaders on Friday at noon." "I spoke to scholar and author Stanley Kurtz, who's done extensive research on Alinsky." "Well, Alinsky wants to polarize." "He wants the people he calls "the haves" to feel guilty and he wants the people he calls "the have nots" to feel resentful." "Alinsky perfected the art of the political shakedown." "I have, on occasion, remarked that I felt confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday, out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday, even though he was certain to be executed on Monday." "While finishing graduate school, Alinsky sought out an unusual mentor." "Frank Nitti, Al Capone's number two in the Chicago mob." "Known as a thug or a hoodlum." "Also known as a racketeer and gangster." "Nitti took me under his wing." "I called him the professor and I became his student." "Nitti's boys took me everywhere, showed me all of the mob's operations from gin mills and whorehouses and bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take over." "Within a few months, I got to know the workings of the Capone mob inside out." "Alinsky saw up close the ease with which the Mafia could extract money through theft, intimidation and murder." "But he figured out a way to do it without going to prison." "How is it the haves prosper while we struggle just to survive?" "He wanted to build from the ground up by creating a sort of coalition of community organizations that he hoped to establish all across the country." "The one thing I've come to realize is that any positive action for radical social change will have to be focused on the white middle class for the simple reason that this is where the real power lies." "The American middle class is decent." "It wants to live up to its own ideals." "Alinsky knew that if he could show a gap between people's lives and their ideals, he could exploit their shame to gain power." "Alinsky became the godfather in the art of using shame for political shakedown." "But he needed an army of recruits to carry out the shakedown." "And he knew where to look." "The 1960s saw the birth of a new generation alienated from its parents, alienated from America." "Ripe pickings for Alinsky." "But first he had to straighten them out." "I have a hell of a lot more love than you have because I'm willing to go out and get corruptive for it." "I'm willing to fight for it." "I'm willing to stick my life on the line on it." "And you're just willing to stick around and talk about love and hippies and not do a damn thing." "Alinsky wrote an instruction manual for this new army of shakedown artists." "In Rules For Radicals, we discover that the mobster Frank Nitti was not Alinsky's only mentor." "Alinsky was an atheist." "What could he possibly learn from the Devil?" "Three things." "Polarization." "We've got to get away from all this reconciliation jazz and all this friendship and all that kind of business." "Demonization." "They'd love to see all the Negroes in America living on the reserves." "And deception." "You do what you can with what you have and close it with moral arguments." "Today, Alinsky's influence can be seen across academia," "the media" "and government." "And his most famous disciple lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." "I don't think there's any doubt that Barack Obama really hasn't leveled with the American public about his political past." "And this is probably the most dramatic example." "Obama first encountered Alinskyite organizing at a series of socialist conferences that he attended when he lived in New York City as a young man." "Those conferences touted Alinskyite organizing as the next big political wave and as the best way to bring socialism to America." "And those same conferences touted Chicago as the place to find the very best Alinskyite organizers." "Clearly Obama has mastered the Alinskyite strategy of deception." "We will keep this promise." "If you like your doctor, you keep seeing your doctor." "If you like your doctor..." "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." "Save a typical family an average of $2,500." "I'll make our government open and transparent." "We're building a transparent process." "No matter what you've heard, if you like your doctor or health care plan, you can keep it." "If you don't have insurance, you'll finally be able to afford it." "Alinsky would be so proud of Obamacare." "It's a masterpiece of distortion and extortion." "Here's the distortion." "Obama gives the impression that he is colluding with us against the insurance companies." "But in reality, he's colluding with the insurance companies against us." "He's forcing Americans to buy insurance who don't want to buy it." "And this makes the insurance companies very happy because it means more profits for them." "With the corporate and the bank bailouts, it was the same deal." "Obama embraced the bailouts." "He recognized it was a way for the federal government to gain control over those institutions." "What these naive corporate executives don't realize is that while they might make a profit on Sunday, they could be gone by Monday." "But Obama wasn't the only disciple." "Well, when Hillary was still in high school, she fell under the spell of a Methodist youth minister." "And at that time Hillary had been a Goldwater girl." "A conservative growing up in a perfectly conventional American suburb." "But this very charismatic Methodist minister drew Hillary sharply to the left." "Mr. Alinsky, this is Hillary." " A pleasure." " Nice to meet you." " Are you enjoying your work back there?" " I am." "Well, you'll have a lot of it." "After high school, Hillary met with Alinsky again at Wellesley College, where she invited him to speak." "Later, Alinksy would offer her a job, but Hillary turned it down." "When she got to college, she decided to focus on Alinsky as her senior thesis work." "Hillary was looking to Alinsky for a way to put her existing leftist ideology into practice." "But in studying Alinsky." "Hillary came to the conclusion that Alinsky organizing could never truly transform America unless it somehow was connected more deeply" "To the core of the American political system." "Alinsky always opposed tight relationships between community organizers and politics." "So this is where Hillary decided to take Alinsky in a different direction." "While Alinsky wanted the radicals to pressure the government," "Hillary wanted the radicals to become the government." "Why try to shame people from the outside when you can intimidate them from the inside?" "So I would say on ideology." "Hillary is closer to Obama than she is to Bill." "Hillary figured it out, Obama is now carrying it out." "The IRS, EPA, DOJ, NSA are all collecting information and storing it on every American." "Welcome to the Panopticon, a prison designed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 1800s." "His design gave the guards a God's eye view." "Here, there's no privacy," "What Bentham envisioned for a prison has now become the hi-tech Panopticon." "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls." "The United States is not spying on ordinary people who don't threaten our national security." "There's no question that the collection of these huge amounts of data gives the government the ability to go after anybody and everybody." "The government will always use as much power as you give it." "It will always go up to and sometimes cross over, eh, the line." "That's a real problem, particularly if we're looking at everyone's Internet searches, we're looking at what magazines you read, what books you read, and really a lot of your life." "Imagine how much of your life is online." "If they can look at your Visa bill without a warrant." "This program, by the way, is fully overseen by the FISA Court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch or government generally is not abusing them and that it's being carried out consistent with the Constitution." "The FISA Court should not be allowed to use the term "court."" "It is not a court." "A court by definition means an institution that hears both sides of a case and controversy." "Due process is an open court." "Adversarial process on both sides of it." "But it's not in a secret court." "FISA, with nobody to advocate for the individual that's being spied upon." "Judges should not be allowed to wear robes." "They shouldn't be allowed to use the word "judge."" "They shouldn't be allowed to use the word "court."" "And it's misleading the public." "Many people will say, "I haven't done anything wrong" ""and so I don't really care if they read my mail."" "The problem with that is it's a much different standard than innocent until proven guilty." "It's that everything is open." "They come into your house and say," ""Oh, you've been sending e-mails to someone in Lebanon." ""We suspect you of terrorism."" "If they get in your house and they find no terrorism, you're not connected, but they find you have paint that you brought home from the office that you bought with a business expense and you were painting your office," "now you're painting the inside of your house, you've now committed a tax violation." "Or maybe they find you have an unregistered gun." "Everything in America now is criminal." "You can't practice commercial law or real estate law, be in the hedge fund business, do a great many things without running afoul of potential criminal statute." "Harvey, you've written a book that has the remarkable title" "Three Felonies a Day." "Now, how is it possible for an ordinary guy to commit three felonies a day?" "On a normal day, the average reasonably engaged American does at least three things that arguably can be deemed federal felonies by some ambitious" "Department of Justice prosecutor." "The problem with most federal felonies is that an average normal person, even, I have to say, a lot of my fellow lawyers, wouldn't have a clue that what they're engaging in is arguably prosecutable." "Well, and consider it on top of this IRS scandal where it appears as if the government is using the IRS for partisan reasons." "Maybe I'm not so, uh, confident that I would want all my phone records given to, uh, the government if it appears maybe I could be targeted by the government." "I talk to people routinely now who I don't think are paranoid, who are saying, "I'm a little worried about having my name" ""publically associated with conservatives or Republicans because I fear retaliation." ""I fear that I will be targeted by the SEC or the IRS" ""or different arms of government."" "And I think it's a legitimate fear." "I think there's probably almost nothing more fundamentally un-American than using government to target your political opponents." "Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal." "During the Nixon Administration, I was audited four times." "I was audited because I was a very vocal critic of the Nixon Administration." "We all pay taxes." "We all file tax returns." "And talk about a trap for the unwary." "They can get absolutely anybody." "They can bankrupt you just from trying to defend against them." "And then the rest of the game is are you going to avoid a long prison sentence and pled guilty for a short sentence?" "There are a lot of people in prison today based on guilty pleas who could have won their case had they litigated it." "But the risks of litigation are so great that they can't afford to do it." "It was Lavrenty Beria who told Stalin," ""Show me the man and I'll find you the crime."" "What the government did to our little group in Wetumpka, Alabama, is un-American." "It isn't a matter of firing or arresting individuals." "The individuals who sought to intimidate us were acting as they thought they should in a government culture that has little respect for its citizens." "Many of the agents and agencies of the federal government do not understand that they are servants of the people." "They think they are our masters, and they are mistaken." "I'm not interested in scoring political points." "I want to protect and preserve the America that I grew up in." "The America that people crossed oceans and risked their lives to become a part of." "And I am terrified it is slipping away." "Thank you." "Aaron Swartz was an internet whiz kid." "At 14, he developed a new way to publish information on the Web." "In his late teens, he cofounded a company that merged with Reddit to become one of the Web's most frequently used social news sites." "He became a vocal critic of several of the Obama Administration's policies." "The freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on would be suddenly deleted." "Aaron Swartz was prosecuted by the US Attorney's office in Massachusetts for allegedly breaking into the computer networks at MIT and downloading without authorization thousands of academic articles." "He was charged with crimes that would have carried a penalty of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million fine." "The articles were funded by taxpayer money and Aaron thought they should be available to the public." "The government argued they were copyrighted material." "It strikes me as disproportionate, being used inappropriately to try to bully, uh, someone into pleading guilty to something that strikes me as rather, uh, minor." "The company that owns the copyrighted articles asked federal prosecutors to drop the charges." "But the prosecutor wanted to send Aaron to prison." "On January 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz took his own life." "He was 26 years old." "New accusations that the feds are unfairly targeting conservatives in an effort to silence those who do not agree with the Obama Administration during a crucial election year." "Conservative filmmaker and author Dinesh D'Souza is the latest victim to be targeted by the Obama White House." "And he's also the man behind the anti-Obama documentary 2016, Obama's America." "Dinesh D'Souza was indicted on federal charges of violating campaign finance laws." "But do you believe this is because of the film that you did leading up to last year's election?" "I made a mistake and I'm not above the law." "No one is." "But we don't want to live in a society where Lady Justice has one eye open and winks at her friends and casts an evil eye at her adversaries." "Where will they stop?" "At the point where we stop them." "We won't let them shame us." "We won't let them intimidate us." "We're going to start telling the true story of America." "In stone, our leaders appear only as legends." "No faults, no fears, no self-doubts." "But also no laughter." "No hope." "No love." "And yet our human experience tells us they had all of these in the troubles they faced." "They're ready for you, Mr. President." "Ready, Mother?" "My friends, no one who is not in my situation can appreciate the feelings of sadness I have at this parting." "To this place and to the kindness of these people, I owe everything." "Here I have lived for a quarter of a century." "To you, dear friends, I owe all that I have, all that I am." "I leave now, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me that is greater than that which rested upon Washington." "Fire!" "Without the assistance of the Almighty who attended him, I cannot succeed." "With that assistance, I cannot fail." "Fire it in, boys!" "Trusting in him who can go with me and remain with you and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well." "Through his care commending you, as I hope that in your prayers you will commend me." "I bid you an affectionate farewell." "And how badly we need right now a Washington, a Lincoln, a Reagan." "Well, we don't have them." "But we do have us." "The Revolution was a struggle for the creation of America." "The Civil War was a struggle for the preservation of America." "World War ll was a struggle for the protection of America." "Our struggle is for the restoration of America." "President Reagan once said," ""Ours is the only national anthem that ends with a question." ""Every generation must answer that question."" "Let us resolve to fight for America as if the outcome of the struggle depended on us alone." "We cannot do anything less." "This is our home." "A lost sailor." " He was looking for my country, not yours." " Yes." " Yeah, but you wish he didn't come." " I wish he didn't come." "I spoke with Charmaine White Face, a Native American activist and member of the Great Sioux Nation whose ancestral land, the Black Hills, includes Mount Rushmore." "Having Mount Rushmore here is horrible." "It's a symbol of oppression." "It's a symbol of genocide for our people." "The charge of genocide begins with Columbus enslaving 1,500 Arawak Indians"