BUCK: Our friend, Ned Ryun, joins us now. He is the founder of American Majority. He’s got a great new book out as well, The Adversaries: A Story of Boston and Bunker Hill. Ned, my friend, good to have you.

NED: Yeah, it’s good to be with you guys. Looking forward to it.

BUCK: So you are a Loudoun County guy, right?

NED: Yes.

BUCK: You live right down around there. Clay and I have been talking a lot about how that was kind of the spark for a lot of the anti-CRT parent protests that have been going on; now teachers are getting in on it. Can you just bring us up to speed? Why it happened in Loudoun, where it stands right now, the pushback against the CRT stuff?

NED: Well, the pushback is coming in the firm of a recall effort in which, you know, Iain Pryor has done amazing work. We’ve come alongside with American Majority Action, the C4, to do signature gathering. And we’re gonna go after, I believe, it’s six of the board members to get them recalled. Hopefully we’ll go through the circuit court.

We’ll get a special election probably first of the year to be able to replace them. First of all, they’d be removed, then be replaced and then we could go after and really put in the right people in, probably in January or February of next year if things go well. No, I’m Loudoun County is pretty surprising.

Loudoun used to be one of the bastions of Republicanism. Obviously, those dynamics have changed over the last decade as more of the swamp has moved out into western Loudoun. We’re about an hour outside of D.C. but it’s been pretty disappointing to watch.

We do about $1.5 billion in taxes toward the school system here in Loudoun County. And basically, the school board has told us to go pound sand. They take our money and say, “Go pound sand. We’ll teach your kids whatever we want to teach ’em. You sit down and shut up,” and a lot of us are saying, we don’t think so.

CLAY: Ned, I think that’s well said. We’re seeing something similar where I live in Williamson County —

NED: I saw that.

CLAY: — which is right outside Franklin, Brentwood, the mask mandate battle. I was there. I spoke president school board as a parent, and I know you’re a parent as well. Why do you think there is this crystalization of anger, and it’s coming at the ground roots level associated with school boards? What has made this happen? ‘Cause my argument is, this feels like the inception of a new Tea Party movement —

NED: Yes.

CLAY: — that’s being led by a lot of parents out there who’ve just had enough.

NED: Yeah. Now. I think the thing that’s encouraging, too, is it goes across party lines.

CLAY: Yeah.

NED: When people are surveyed at the door, “Do you support or disagree with CRT?” about 51% actually disagree with CRT. Only about 30% here in Loudoun County support it. Where you’re getting the Democrats and independents however is the fact that the school board won’t teach advanced math courses or other advanced courses and a lot of Democrats and independents are saying, “Hey, we didn’t sign up for this like we want the best students for our kids.” So I’m encouraged that it is this grassroots groundswell and I think part of it the fact that everybody at home over the last year, year and a half going, “Wait, what are they teaching my kids? What are they not teaching my kids?” We get to see what’s being taught on video.

All the sudden, this clarity in which a lot of parents again across party lines said, “Hey, wait a minute. We’re spending a lot of money on this, we’re spending a lot of time and effort. These are our kids, this is our kids’ future, and we didn’t sign up for this. You’re not gonna do this anymore,” and the school board’s arrogance and really just looking at the parents and going we can do whatever we want, and parents are saying, “We don’t think so.”

So my hope is that Loudoun County and other places we’re gonna be able to demonstrate, you can take out school board members. You can get the right people in and hopefully people that are responsive to the parents’ needs. This is the amazing thing to me about all of this not only in school boards, but across the country with elected officials, “Hey, I’m sorry. You’re supposed to serve us. We have made you stewards of the money and the power given to you by the American people. We don’t serve you. You serve us. So figure it out.”

BUCK: Ned, it is amazing that you’ve got this one teacher who said that he would not use the “preferred pronouns” because he felt it went against his religion.

NED: That’s right.

BUCK: A judge… This is all, again, in Loudoun County, Virginia, everybody. It’s the front lines. This is across the country in a lot of places, but Loudoun County’s gotten a lot of attention. He said that he wouldn’t go along with this. A judge reinstated him into his job after he got fired —

NED: Yes.

BUCK: — and now the school district is fighting still to get rid of him! That’s how dedicated to this people — some of these authoritarian, Democrat brainwashing cadres — really are, Ned. I think people should know about this. They won’t even give it up even when a judge says, “No, you really can’t fire a teacher of good conscience over this.”

NED: There are a couple dynamics with this. First of all, they’ve been paying attention to the state and local level positions for a long time, much to our shame because we haven’t focused like we should have on school boards, our city councils, our county commissions. So they have a leg up on us because they have put a focus into it.

But you’re right. The thing that we have to remember, Buck, is this. For them, this is not a career. They are religious zealots. This is, for them, a worldview in which they have to make sure that every idea is implemented to the absolute last Nth, because it is a belief, it is a system in which they will change the world. This is the whole premise of progressives, that we will actually use the state to advance progress so that someday we’ll all reach nirvana or utopia.

And if you don’t like it, well, you’re part of the irredeemable deplorables. But this is the amazing part to me, again, the arrogance on display. And I hope that the American people across the country are going to rise up and say, “We’re done. We’re going to run you out of office not only at the state level and local level but also at the federal level as well.”

CLAY: Amen. Speaking of the federal level, Ned, I know you are an expert in many ways on the budget. We had the crazy budgetrama going on last night ’til 4-some-odd in the morning, $3.5 trillion. What’s going to happen? Is or are we gonna see Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema put the skids on this R3.5 trillion or not?

NED: (sigh)

CLAY: How would you handicap the budget as we sit today?

NED: Well, you’re always in a terrible position if you have to rely on Joe Manchin to be your backstop. That all to say his comments even in the last couple hours should give us hope that he’s not for this 3.5 trillion. He feels it’s irresponsible; he feels like it will help inflation explode even more.

So, boy, I gotta tell you, I feel optimistic that Manchin and Sinema will toe the line and hopefully say, “Enough’s enough.” This is the insane part. We went from a $1.2 trillion, quote, unquote, infrastructure bill, which is not infrastructure at all, to then literally in the next moment doing another $3.5 trillion, and we don’t have the money.

We’re already $30 trillion in debt and here we are spending money like drunken sailors. At some point, we have to stop and say, “We don’t have the money or the resources to be able to do this.” We’re putting ourselves on a terrible trajectory.

BUCK: Speaking of Ned Ryun, he’s the founder of American Majority and also has a great new book out, The Adversaries: A Story of Boston and Bunker Hill.

CLAY: Ned, we’re nerds. I’m actually curious about the book. We’re history nerds.

BUCK: I gotta tell Clay, “We gotta do news of the day first; then we’ll do the history stuff.”

CLAY: I’m glad to hear about your book, Ned, because I’m an American history nerd. I know Buck is too, even though he sometimes pretends that he isn’t. Tell me about the book because I’m fascinated. I just finished and a guy’s name gonna escape me now but he’s doing a trickle on the American Revolution and I just finished the first one recently. It was financial.

NED: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he did a great job. I believe it’s Rick Atkins that you’re referring to.

CLAY: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

NED: It’s phenomenal and that’s more of historical nonfiction narrative. But I would highly recommend it as well. But no, The Adversaries… Boy, it started with the fascination of Dr. Joseph Warren, who was a young protege of Sam Adams — a young, Harvard-educated doctor — who really in those last nine or 10 months became one of the leading organizers in the political resistance against Parliament, against the king’s ministers.

He became president of provincial Congress, major general in the new army. But it became much more than that as I started doing research of really trying to understand, why did Englishmen stop talking to each other and start shooting each other, because most of Massachusetts at the time was direct English lineage.

So it just is this last nine, 10 months as things accelerate, as Englishmen on one side of the Atlantic realize, “We have these rights. We have sacrosanct rights that we believe were given to us by a transcendent Creator. No earthly power gave them to us. No earthly power can revoke them.”

Parliament and the king’s ministers said, “Yeah, we think those are more a series of suggestions, and you’re gonna do what we want you to. You’re going to pay your taxes. You’re gonna pay for the damage to the Boston Tea Party. And if you don’t, we’ll send more men, we’ll send more warships until you actually submit and comply.”

I think the thing that’s the overall arching theme of this is principal defiance in the face of authoritarianism. What do you actually believe about your rights? What are you willing to do to actually resist? The founders of the free American republic didn’t just wake up one morning and go, “Yeah, we don’t like the English anymore; we’re just gonna stop obeying their laws.”

No, this was a principled, thought out process in which they said we have rights, we believe these rights to self government, elections, to property. All of these things are rights that we have a right to defend but an obligation to defend, and so you see these things start to accelerator. So it’s the last nine, 10 months before Bunker Hill and then culminating with the battle of Bunker Hill and really involves around truly somebody I believe to be a singular man, Dr. Joseph Warren.

BUCK: Check out The Adversaries: A Story of Boston and Bunker Hill. I’ve got my copy at home. The author is Ned Ryun, our friend, Ned. Mr. Ryun, always good to have you, buddy. Congrats on the book. We’ll talk to you soon.

NED: Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.