Ned Ryun
speaker
716 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 24 Dec
Ned Ryun’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
I am for all of the above in whatever approach it takes in the short term to stop the madness. I talk about this a little bit in the book where you've got system dynamics and inside of this massive sprawling system, you've got these reinforcing loops that continue to grow and grow and compound. It's almost like compounding interest and then just explode in size and strength.
Yeah, I think you've got to start stopping these little reinforcing loops like revoking security clearances.
um so i think there's a whole variety of american leviathan american leviathan leviathan's a sea monster it is but also the second definition is a massive sprawling bureaucracy that that borders on totalitarian yes but the leviathan is described in i think job and isaiah right yeah in the old testament yes as a some sort of not quite
Yeah, quasi-demonic sea monster that God eventually conquers, that Yahweh eventually conquers. But the second definition is definitely about a massive sprawling bureaucracy that tends to be authoritarian and totalitarian. And that's what we have. I mean, this is the one thing that I just... It kind of started dawning on me years ago. Like, there's a serious problem with how DC operates.
I mean, I was at the White House, George W. Bush, don't hate me for this. I wrote for him, which was a really interesting experience. You know, whenever you get to write for a president, he's signing your stuff, that's awesome. While my dad was in the House voting against all of his major pieces of legislation. Yeah.
which was pretty, when you go, when you're young and you go to DC and you're kind of new to what you think all Republicans are created equal, all the red guys are good guys and all the blue guys are bad guys. And then you start to realize, like I said earlier, not all Republicans are created equal. There's definitely like different shades along the way.
And I remember my dad having to take some pretty strong stances in the House and voting against a lot of these major initiatives from George W. Bush because he strongly believed they were not conservative at all in the least bit. In fact, one of the biggest ones was Medicare Part D. This is one of the, my dad is- The prescription drug benefit. Yes, the prescription drug benefit.
I think it was 2003, right before the 2004 election. They really wanted it because they felt that it would help the senior vote. And there were about 24, about two dozen holdouts in the House and the Republican caucus that said, we're not going to vote for this. We're just not going to. They brought them down to the White House.
They had Dick Cheney and all the senior White House staff kind of have a little chitchat with them. They all came back and said, we're still not voting for this. And then Bush was overseas and started lobbying them directly. And I remember him calling my dad and saying, I really need this vote. And my dad was like, you know, you're doing a great job representing us overseas, sir.
Jim, I really need this vote. I'm not giving you this vote. Click. That was it. It was the end of the conversation. And yeah, my dad fighting tooth and nail to try and prevent that from passing. It actually passed by one vote because they kept the House floor open for an additional I don't know how many hours and eventually got someone to switch their vote in the like 3 a.m., 4 a.m. hour.
This was a Karl Rove project. It was. Yeah. You realize compassionate conservatism is just another name for big government. So this is the other thing, too. I make this point. Remember when people treated Karl Rove like a genius? Yes.
The thing that Donald Trump, again, and why he's viewed as such an existential threat by permanent D.C. is he rejects the premise. Yeah. Nixon and Reagan rejected the premise that the administrative state was legitimate. And I think actually Watergate is really more a story of that than anything else.
I mean, when you go back and look at the story of Watergate, Richard Nixon had just won $500 million. 520 electoral votes. Biggest victory in American history. 49 states, won by 20 million votes in the popular vote. It was massive. And he talked very clearly about what he intended to do in the second term in restructuring and dismantling administrative state.
And then, lo and behold, Watergate happens, and there's a lot of questions about what actually went down.
Yeah, Mark Feld goes to his corporate propagandists, Woodward and Bernstein. And Woodward was a former naval intel officer. And uses them as the mouthpiece to then take out the duly elected president of the United States, who was an existential threat to the administrative state. Flip side of the coins, Russiagate. Same thing.
Because the first Republican president since Reagan to reject the premise that the administrative state is legitimate was Donald Trump. George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush were like... We're okay with it as long as we get to run it. And this is what always worries me a little bit about Republicans who are like, well, it's okay as long as we're running it.
No, it's a poisonous tree with poisonous fruit. You cannot reform it.
Why didn't Nixon do that? I don't know. But that shows you who Donald Trump is as a person. Right. No, you're right. I mean, Nixon could have done that. He didn't. Donald Trump basically has. No, no, no, no. That's not the truth of what's taking place. And he stood up and he said, this is completely politically motivated. They're trying to take me out because I'm a threat to them.
let me ask about something you alluded to which is can i say something really quick of course please the amount of courage that it simply took to say something out loud that people would consider verboten yeah that's part of donald trump's great power.
He'll say stuff out loud to people that you shouldn't say that, or you can't be saying that, but he needs to say, and he should say it because of situations like this, where he has the ability to say it.
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