Will Cain Country - Revisiting A Conversation On Who Really Runs Washington

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

Today, Will revisits a conversation with American conservative activist, CEO of American Majority, and former Speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Ned Ryun, to discuss in detail, what permanent Washington and the "uniparty" really mean. Will and Ned break down where the real power in Washington D.C. lies, and who really controls the levers that affect policy making and enforcement in the nation's capital.   They discuss the background of how the Capitol has changed over the years, and how progressive statism from the early 1910s led to a permanent growth of government that some feel has gotten out of control. Ryun sheds light on how powerful unelected bureaucrats are often the ones making the real decisions.   Tell Will what you thought about this podcast by emailing [e-mail]   Follow Will on Twitter: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash-brown and a small iced coffee for $5.5 plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. Two tiers of justice, a lack of accountability, David Weiss, a poet's special counsel to investigate Joe Biden. How deep is the rot in Washington, D.C. To Wilcane podcast on Fox News Podcast, what's up, and welcome to Monday.

As always, I hope you will download, rate, and review this podcast wherever you get your audio entertainment at Apple, Spotify, or at Fox News Podcasts. Today, I'm coming to you from an airport in Seattle, on my way to Maui. As you know, this story's been near and dear to my heart. Our fundraising operation, which I talked to you about in the last episode of the Wilcame podcast, helped the people of Maui at GoFundMe has now raised over half a million dollars. I'm incredibly humbled by all of you who are supporting these people who have heard this story and who have stepped up in the way that we do in America.

I'm going to head to Maui and see the story firsthand, reported on Fox and Friends, and bring her back to you here on the Will Cane. podcast as well. I'm emotionally and physically prepared for something that I'm sure is going to be difficult to experience, but of course nothing compared to those who've lived through this in Lahaina. I hope to focus on what's important, the people doing good and eventually what went wrong in Maui. But because I'm traveling today and we bring you that story in the future, about today with the announcement that David Weiss has been appointed by Merrick Garland to investigate Joe Biden, we'd look into how deep is the rot in Washington, D.C.

David Weiss, of course, is the Delaware prosecutor who said he had all the power he needed at one time after requesting to be special counsel to investigate Joe Biden. Weirdly, after having that denied and then saying all that he needed was available to him in the form of power, he's now been given the power of special counsel. Of course, that doesn't. doesn't exactly look like it's on the up and up free of corruption when David Weiss is the prosecutor who came back with an absolutely sweetheart plea deal for Hunter Biden. So sweet, it was thrown out by a judge. How now can we accept that he is the right man to once again investigate Hunter Biden at a deeper level and to come up with, I assume, because of a new title,

a new conclusion? It reveals something deeper in Washington, D.C., a problem in the FBI and the Department of Justice in the political class that we might revisit today in a conversation we had with Ned Ryan. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Ned Ryan. Hey, we know you probably hit play to escape your business banking, not think about it. But what if we told you there was a way to skip over the pressures of banking? By matching with a TD small business account manager, you can get the proactive business banking advice and support your business needs. Ready to press play? Get up to $2,700 when you open select small business banking products. Yep, that's $2,700 to turn up your business. Visit TD.com slash small business match to learn more. Conditions apply. I'm Janice Dean. Join

me every Sunday as I focus on stories of hope and people who are truly rays of sunshine in their community and across the world. Listen and follow now at foxnewspodcast.com. Ned Ryan, I'm so glad to have you here on the Will Kane podcast, have a longer conversation. All of our interactions have been in three-minute Fox and Friends or Tucker Carlson hits, but now I get to really have a conversation with Ned Ryan. No, I'm looking forward to you. I appreciate you, right.

Yeah, usually TV, it's three minutes max. Sometimes it's 50 seconds, even sometimes. I got text messages after last Monday nights hit. And I'm like, man, you stuck that lane. man, you took those 50 seconds and you made the most of it. I'm like, that's all I had, but I was going to do it. Well, great job sticking the landing on Tucker Carlson. In 50 seconds, good luck sticking the landing here with Will Kane in 20 minutes.

Ned, I want to start with this. I have taken to understanding our political landscape by, I think, recognizing and then using the term of something called the Uniparty, of people. permanent Washington. And it's a question about who and where is the real power in the United States of America. What do you think is the answer to that question? Where is power in the United States? So let me take a little bit longer route in getting to that answer because it didn't just start last year or a decade ago. If you really want to look at the rise of the Uniparty and who I think is really making the decisions in D.C. It started over. over 100 years ago with the rise of the progressive status movement in which progressive

statism. And I think that's one thing that we've got to do, Will, is we can't simply call them progressives anymore because they're absolutely about the power of the state and all power being centralized and consolidated into this massive administrative state. But progressive statism became the governing philosophy for both Republicans and Democrats. Really 1912 to 1920, you look at all those constitutional nemesis that got passed. And they all agreed in really this seismic change in how we approach governing this country in that it should be an administrative state,

a massive bureaucracy, filled with an educated elite, very powerful bureaucrats, as Woodrow Wilson would say, with as little political oversight as possible, because politics would corrupt the process. And so if you ask me, who do I think is really making the decisions in D.C.? it's not even the uniparty Republican Democrats in the establishment, per se.

It is this massive, powerful administrative state. Elections come and go will, but they remain. And I'm really coming to the conclusion, having been involved, my dad ran for the House in 1996. He was in the House for 10 years. I've been around D.C. for a couple decades now. I am firmly of the opinion that politics and a lot of what takes place in D.C. is sound and fury signifying nothing, because the real power and the real decision-making

and the real governance comes from those unelected, powerful bureaucrats who are making most of the decisions. And the thing that's really disappointing and shocking and stunning in all of this will is that over the course of the decades, the supposed representatives of the American people, are duly elected representatives, have of their own volition seated control and power and governing to this administrative state. So that's who's making real decisions in D.C. if you asked me. I did ask you, and I love that you've begun to give us that definition. I happen to agree with you, and I think that the best illustration of what you've just defined

is that the bandwidth of political differences has been so narrow, from election to an election, even from idea to idea. It really is fascinating when you think about. whether or not it's popular culture driven by the media or the pundit class, that when we talk about radicalism, what we're actually talking about is a pretty narrow bandwidth of idea diversity, of how you run this country. And I'm curious now, though, for you to put some specificity on that definition of permanent Washington. Who are we talking about?

Career bureaucrats. You can use illustrations, but what are we talking about? individuals within the FBI, within the Department of Justice, within the IRS. Define it with specificity, Permanent Washington. Permanent Washington are these career bureaucrats that they're not here for a couple years. They're here for decade or decades. They're the ones that decide, I mean, let me give you an example, Will, this recent oversight hearing with Chuck Grassley and Chris Ray, in which Chris Ray could,

hardly be bothered to actually show up for any length of time. In fact, informed Grassley up front, hey, I've got to go. I've got a plane waiting for me. We find out later it's the private FBI jet to fly him to his family vacation. He doesn't care. They literally do not care. They view this oversight as a little bit of a nuisance without teeth. It's literally toothless oversight because many in DC are unwilling to actually call them to account. So when I say the permanent bureaucracy, administrative state. It's people that have literally been around for decades. It's these government employees of which there are about two million that have been in D.C. It's a sprawling, massive bureaucracy. We don't even actually know the exact figure,

Will. It's somewhere over 430 departments, agencies and sub-agency, but there's actually not a precise figure because people quibble, you know, what's the exact number? They don't really know, but our elected officials continue to fund this without asking the question, where is this money going? Is it being used to promote and protect the interests of the American people? And it just continues to perpetuate. And, you know, I'm working actually on a new book called American Leviathan in which I'm trying to explain some of this through system dynamics in which all of these reinforcing loops that were begun 100 years ago have continued to revolve and strengthen and strengthen. And every time you start a new department or agency and you add in maybe another thing, 1,000 to 1,500 federal employees, these reinforcing loops get stronger and stronger. It's almost

like compounding interest. It gets stronger, and it accelerates. And this is the problem that we're experiencing right now. And I tell people, they ask me, do you think that we have a chance to return to a constitutional republic form of governing versus administrative state? And my honest answer is maybe 50-50 at best. We're up against it, and there's a lot of things that have to be unwound that have been building for 100 years. You know, I think a great illustration of what you just described, those reinforcing loops, I would give you, too. It'd be the IRS tax code and the federal criminal code. These are things that begin humbly.

They begin quaint. And today, one can't even quantify the federal criminal code. I believe it was some politician in the past couple of years that attempted to quantify. I mean, literally put their arms around the federal criminal code. And they ended up with books upon books upon books, stacked across a desk and mounted as high as you could see. And no one, I mean, literally, I don't know that there is any one person that fully understands the extent of the federal criminal code.

And I don't think that the human side of that bureaucracy is probably any different. But I'd even go back to the federal income tax, again, coming out of the progressive movement. And I'm going to talk about some of the founders of the progressive movement. I call them the four horsemen of the progressive apocalypse. And one of them is Robert Lafellette. He was the governor of Wisconsin, became a Republican. Republican governor of Wisconsin becomes a senator. He was the only Republican to actually vote in 1913 for the federal income tax

because he strongly believed it was a vehicle for the redistribution of wealth. So if you go back and look at what we're experiencing today, you can draw a straight line from where the progressive started, what they intended to what we're experiencing today. And I guess my only surprise is that we haven't experienced it, sooner. And I think the reason, again, when you look at reinforcing loops and compounding interest, obviously it's gradual and then it explodes. But I also think we're getting to that point where a lot of people inside this administrative state are, first of all, they're done with democracy. It's a very messy thing. It's very frustrating for them. They don't want to have to deal

with it anymore. But they've also become very frustrated with the dirty little peasants who haven't figured out what's best for them. And therefore, we're not really interested in having a conversation. You're going to submit and comply to what we think is best, what we think is best for progress where you're going to experience perhaps 87,000 armed IRS agents to help you see the picture a little clear. Hey, Ned, what do you think is the animating motivation of the Leviathan? Is it elitism in that we know best how to govern your life to prosperity? Or is it sheer self-interest of protecting the budget that gives life and purpose to your career? I think the original purpose, again, dangerously naive, was they thought that somehow they could form a government

that would resolve all of the conflicts inside of human nature and government, which is, of course, the fool's errands. I mean, we're imperfect human beings in an imperfect world. That's what the founders understood. The founders understood we are imperfect human beings and an imperfect world. We are given all these God-given rights, but at the same time, we should ever be trusted with consolidated power. And what the progressives wanted to do is consolidate all of that power into administrative state, again, because they thought eventually it would lead to progress in which we would solve all these conflicts within government and human nature. I think where it's gotten to now, though, is they do think that the progressive credentialed elite, and again, I call it more

of a credentialed idiocracy, that they have the power, they want the power. I think some of them it has devolved into we have power, we want to keep it. I think some are still foolish enough to think that they're actually pushing ideas that will lead to human progress, which is idiotic. But I think it has become one of those things that they have set out on the path. They have committed to this administrative state politics is their religion. Their administrative state is the holy of holies. And they are going to fight tooth and nail to see, make sure that it is not threatened. And that's one of the reasons I think. And I know I said this to you on Monday night when you were hosting Tucker. They see Donald Trump as an existential threat because

he rejects the premise of it. I think that was one of the things that I don't know if Trump could fully maybe explain that, but he showed up in D.C. in January of 2017, and said, I'm the duly elected president of United States. I decide. And the administrative state folks are like, no, no, no, you've missed the whole idea here. We're the ones that decide. And in an administrative state, they would be correct. In a constitutional republic, he would be correct. And so you're also seeing this tension that's been underneath the surface for the last. years fully exploding in which you have two very deeply conflicting governing philosophies finally coming to that breaking point where one's going to win out.

And Donald Trump was, I say he's the truth serum and red pill wrapped into one delightful package that has brought significant clarity to where we are right now with this country. And we've got a lot of decisions to make as to which direction we're going to go. Yeah, and I don't think someone listening who happens to disagree with me politically has to take the word of Ned Ryan, nor the word of Will Kamen. It was reported a few weeks ago by Axios that Donald Trump and his second administration would look to cut. I think it's fairly a humble cut, by the way, at least numerically, 50,000 of those 2 million administrative state employees that you talked about. And I wonder, do you think, Ned, that was the motivation for the raid on Donald Trump?

I think it's, I think it obviously feeds into some of those fears about what a second Trump potential Trump term would look like. in which he has made it very clear. If I come back into power, I will begin. I mean, I've told him, Will, you talk about draining the swamp. Well, the very foundation of the swamp is the administrative state. And the only way that you drain the swamp is to break the foundation. You break the state, you drain the swamp. And you're right.

50,000 is a very small figure. I mean, there's 800,000 non-essential federal government employees. I think 800,000 is actually the correct figure that we should be aiming for. But the very fact that he rejects the premise of the administrative state thinks it's a legitimate, I want a lot more Republicans in D.C. to reject the premise, that this is even a constitutional form of government because it has nothing to do with the constitutional republic, reject the premise, and proactively begin to break it apart. And that includes defunding, dismantling, and devolving. It includes firing not tens of thousands, but potentially hundreds of thousands of federal government employees.

if you break the state, you will drain the swamp. But it's not going to be easy because I don't think a lot of Republicans in D.C. have really come to that conclusion or, in fact, have vested interest in the status quo remaining the same. Hey, to me, Ned, what you're describing is a government on autopilot. The elections come and go, politicians can change, but the government, it continues to exist within this narrow bandwidth because it's on autopilot. How long do you think it's been on autopilot? I think the safest way would be to say decades. You know, I don't know if I have.

have a precise date in mind just yet. In fact, it's one of the things I am researching where I could maybe put, you know, an exact time on, you know, maybe a few years in there. I mean, the whole process was truly begun. I consider 1912 to 1920 really the beginning of the progressive administrative state in which they finally got power. Woodrow Wilson in the White House, Republicans and Democrats agreeing in Congress, the 16th, 17th, 18th, the 19th Amendment, increasing the size of bureaucracy, starting all these new departments and agencies. If I was to say, though, there was an exact date,

you know, maybe it's the third wave of progressivism, because I consider that the first wave, FDR being the second, LBJ, the third. Maybe by the time, it's either in the second or third wave of progressivism in which you started to see more and more of our elected officials starting to cede that power over. And it's just something now that I think is almost understood

by a lot of people in Congress. going to vote for this bill and let them make all the hard decisions. And we'll talk about what to name the schools. And then, Ned, therefore, who holds power in the United States of America? Is it dispersed amongst the administrative state? Is it, is it a fractured group of departments, all who have the same essentially ideas about how to work the world? Who is it that then maintains power? I mean, obviously, you look at all the departments and agencies and the heads of those and the permanent government employees. Again, well, I think the thing that people need understand of these,

there's two million federal government employees, right? And again, they've been around for years, decades. The political appointees, the plum book, at most, might number 5,000 when an administration comes in and gets to actually name people to these various departments and agencies. So you're looking at 5,000 political appointees that come and go and basically two million that remain. I would say, obviously, it's within those, that two million. again, you look at the heads of those, you look at these guys at the DOJ, the FBI, you look at

the surveillance state. Let's face it, the surveillance state in its current form, and the FBI and the DOJ, I think, are an existential threat to the freedom of the American people. If they remain in their current form, all bets are off. So if you were asked me to dial it back, you know, somewhere in that two million figure, you dial it down to the decision makers. I would say it's in the thousands of people that really do most of the governing. in a real way and decide which direction this country is going to go, despite all the storm and fury of politics? Okay, but tell me if you disagree with this, then.

If powers dispersed amongst a few thousand career bureaucrats, what you have then is a monster who has less of ability to decide the direction of the country, because you can never coalesce around a single idea. What you instead have is, in essence, a bowling lane with bumpers along the side. Those few thousand can protect the direction of the country from someone who, you know, with direction. They can put up parameters. So in other words, they can keep certain things from a Donald Trump. They can keep him within the lane of inertia. And so I'm trying to think about how that actually manifests in a meeting, Ned. So let's say Donald Trump goes into a meeting and says,

I want to do X. And people are like, well, Y, Z, and A dictate that if you do that, this happened. So we better not look in those places, Mr. President. And then behind the scenes, don't present him with this information. So in other words, it's less of an arrow and more of sort of the banks of the river that they control. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've been making this argument. We'll continue to make this argument in my new book. They have set the rules for the game. And so we're playing the game by their rules. And as long as we remain to, as long as we remain playing their game by their rules, they have set the parameters. And there are only little wiggles here and there that you can kind of, you know, change a

little bit. The other thing, though, it happens every day in D.C., especially with Republican administrations that come into this into D.C. and are supposed to be in charge for either four to eight years, I have plenty of buddies that have been inside of Republican administrations in which let's say it's a knife fight every day with the careers who have absolutely zero intention. of actually implementing that Republican administration's policies and policy goals. So it's decision makers, but it's everyday careerists who absolutely have zero intention of doing anything. And if they will, if they are pushed to it, they're going to go as slowly as

possible to prevent as much change as possible. So I think you're right in which you say the rules of the game have been set by progressives 100 years ago. We have accepted their terms. and as long as we accept their terms, we are playing within their parameters. And until we actually break the rules, we're going to lose the game. Yeah. So in other words, there's no nefarious figure that is the power behind the throne. It is not even the referee on the field. It is the commissioners of the league who have already defined what the game is about

and how you play the game and the rules within the game. Exactly. And I tell people, too, there's no, there's no like grand conspiracy theory between Administrator State Bureaucrats, the corporate propagandists, I refuse to call the mainstream media that corporate propagandists, all of these various institutions, no, they all came from the same indoctrination centers of higher learning. They bought into the same governing philosophy. It's them implementing everything that they believe in the different institutions in different spheres. There's no grand conspiracy theory. It's just a common worldview of how to govern that they've all accepted.

And do they coalesce against existential threats? like Donald Trump, 100%, is because they've already all agreed on the basic premise of what they believe in how government should actually run. Yes, that is the self-feeding Leviathan. I want to kind of narrow in on the original question, though, and apply it more to current events. Who really maintains power in the United States? Before I ask you directly about the Biden administration, do you think it's fair that the way the rules of the game have been designed, the president himself, regardless of which political

party doesn't have the power that we grant him in popular conception. I mean, George W. Bush wants to be the education president. You know, events unfold. You're not the education president. What more, even if events hadn't unfolded, you really only have so much power when it comes to domestic policy. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even though you are running one of the three main branches of the federal government, you're only running one of three. And for you to actually do anything successfully, obviously you have to try and figure out how to get Congress is doing anything being effective. And then you've got to figure out how to get around the administrative state, people that are fighting you tooth and nails. So in reality, your ability

to accomplish much of anything is pretty limited. And in fact, I would argue, well, having been in D.C., you're pretty limited in what you can accomplish after your first six months because of all the resistance that you will encounter trying to get these policies through the various departments and agencies, the resistance you'll encounter on Capitol Hill. Yeah, it's pretty limited. In fact, that's why I think Donald Trump's first term was pretty incredible that he was able to accomplish some pretty significant things, despite being under attack constantly, despite all of the hurdles that he tried to overcome. But I think what has happened between now and then, and if he gets a second term, I do think it has become clear to him some

of the major obstacles and hurdles that he will now encounter and where the real resistance lies and it is inside that administrative state. I want to come back to that line of question about where the power lies in the presidency and then most specifically in the Biden administration. But I want to take this detour here because I feel like you've opened the door on a couple of occasions. And there's something I'm curious about you. And I'll be real, Ned. I'm going to express this curiosity about you as an individual. It's also honestly a curiosity about myself. And I think many of us who exist within conservatism. Your career is interesting. It goes from George W. Bush to the Tea Party to Donald Trump. And I think it would be fair to say

that reflects an evolution. Is that fair? Tell me about your evolution. I do think it is fair. I will admit, when I was a presidential writer for George W. Bush, 2001, 2002, my father's in the U.S. House at that time, pretty much voting against every one of George W. Bush's major initiatives. So there was definitely a dawning in 2001, 2002, that, hmm, not all Republicans are created equal. There's a lot of differences in approach on how we're to govern. So I would say it's probably, it's probably around then that there was this dawning of interesting. My dad was voted the most conservative member of the U.S. House as last year, 2006, and his governing philosophy differ very much from George W. Bush's.

So I would say it was around then that I started to think, hmm, it's not red versus blue. There's a lot more going on here. And then American majority, I started American majority in 2008. Obviously, the Tea Party started the next year. And I realized a lot of these people don't really under fully understand what's going on. How can we make them more effective?

Came alongside of them. And these were good, you know, salt of the earth, great people. How can we make them politically effective? and it has gotten the point, I think Donald Trump, Donald Trump, I started writing about Americanism back in 2012 and all of a sudden this guy shows up, this brash billionaire from Manhattan talking about Americanism, talking about America first. I'm like, this is what I have been looking for for the last, well, I was 2016, so the last four years. And also it just clicked like, yeah, you know what? This is supposed to be a government of by and for the people in which all the power flows

from the people to their duly elected representatives to actually promote and protect the interests of the American people as that priority, this whole system of government is completely screwed up. And so it has been kind of this evolution along the way in which people have said, wait a minute, you were part of the George W. Bush White House, which I would say is pretty antagonistic towards Donald Trump. How did that happen over the course of time in which you start to actually question the premise? You start to question the premise. I even say this will, and I tell my kids all the time, question everything, except for me. I'm your benevolent dictator.

You can question everything else. Only by questioning everything, do you actually start to kick the tires and really explore, wait, what do I actually believe about this? And then you come to the conclusion, yeah, this is where I'm at right now because of my study of history and questioning of all this. So I believe that your approach is correct with your children, the benevolent dictator. When it comes to my audience, Ned, I want you to, question me as well. Many people who would look at the evolution that you traveled and quite

honestly that I have traveled and my evolution, I will be real, is slower than yours, has been slower than yours. I think many people that would look at that evolution go, well, that's opportunism. You're running to the front of the herd. And I'm fine with you asking that question because here's how I would describe what's happened with me. The Tea Party was obviously a direct reaction, not just to what happened with the Democrats, but with the George W. Bush administration. The Tea Party was, though, very libertarian in nature. It was definitely a small government movement, but one that embraced fairly traditional ideas when it comes to libertarianism, meaning, for example, free trade. Then comes along Donald Trump.

And I will admit, and I have talked with my audience about this, I was not someone who accepted Donald Trump in the beginning because all I could see was the surface of the personality. And I have met President Trump now once, only once. And what I realize, though, is underneath that, there is, yes, policy, but more importantly, a cultural and philosophical regrounding of America. And for me, that was reflected in populism. But populism in itself is something I have throughout my life, and it had been very, very skeptical. because in a lot of ways, populism is the rule of the mob. It's an emotionally driven, crowd-sourced direction. But here's where it won me over.

It's bringing this full circle. It's a rejection of that elitism that you described earlier. The idea that we should be ruled by our benevolent dictators, that we should be ruled in the same way that we parent. And I am from a small town in Texas. And I feel like I grew up. you know, steeped in the life and the culture and the jobs in the economy of the common man. And obviously Donald Trump reconnected to that.

What Amity Shlays once wrote was the forgotten man. And that was my reconnection. Great book. And that was my reconnection to Donald Trump. And that's how I evolved from Republican to Tea Party to America first. Yeah. And listen, I truly believe in Roads in Damascus, experiences where people have epiphanies and all sudden, oh, something like a literally a light

clicked on. No, I think you're right. The thing I would say about Donald Trump is it's not republicanism. It's not democratism. It's, it is Americanism. And that's the one thing that I think people struggle with, because I think Republican Party has been infected by corporatism, you know, government of buying for the corporations in which free market, I think, has been truly perverted into being all about corporations, which is, is terrible. In fact, the one thing that concerns me about that, Will, is Democrats have already figured this out. Republicans and libertarians are a little slow on the uptake. Democrats don't need to make a full-out frontal assault on our inherent rights, the Bill of Rights,

because they can allow corporations to do that, whether it's Twitter, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Google, you name it. And Republicans and libertarians are going to go, oh, we can't touch them because it's free market and the corporations and it's private. So this is a real problem in which the corporatism has completely perverted our thinking. In regards to the populism, I've always considered it constitutional populism in which, again, going back to what I said earlier, the basic premise of the constitutional republic is a government of by and for the people in which everything is to revolve around how do we promote and protect the interests of the American people, the working class, middle class Americans, the American people as a whole. And then that to me is what America first is about, is a constitutional populism of the people according to the constitution. and how do we get back to that point? And again, as I said earlier, we've been 100 years in the making to where we are now. It's not going to happen in a couple of election cycles, but I think we've got a chance. What you just described is the original conception of the United States of

America. You called it constitutional populism. It's a constitutional republic. It is democracy constrained by the constitutional protections of the minority. And instead, the threat to that has become, I believe, like you, an administrative state that does not affect it by the outcome of either democracy or the Constitution. Neither the Constitution nor our popular elections have been successful in inhibiting the growth of the Viathan. Yeah, because there is no accountability. There is no real oversight in which it's not about calling Christopher Ray in front of the Senate to have them give this mealy mouth 90 minutes or whatever it was about what's going on with the FBI, for you to actually have the American people's duly elected representatives demand and expect

accountable, there have to be consequences. That's why I really believe, like Victor Davis-Hanson and others who have been very strong in this, you actually have to defund and dismantle to bring this administrative state to heal to actually protect the American people's interests. And until the duly elected representatives of the American people, stand up and do more of that, we're going to continue to see more of this, where it's just passing time. The calendar says every two years, the House of Representatives gets elected every four years of president, every six years of Senate, but nothing fundamentally changes because Republicans

in D.C. have either accepted the premise or lacks the courage to actually go in an aggressive way and say, nope, we're not going to fund you anymore. We're going to dismantle you. So really quickly, I want to ask this sort of of the current events question, but then I want to get back to the philosophical place where we just left off to end the conversation. Who do you think has, let's combine the limited power of the presidency, which was described earlier. Really quickly, on that note, it's often been said that the presidency's real power is in foreign policy, as by design in the Constitution. And then presidencies are defined by what happens overseas, see example George W. Bush. Do you think even today the presidency does have

that kind of power when it comes to foreign policy? Or is that also dictated by the administrative of state, in this case, the military industrial complex? No, I mean, I think Donald Trump's presidency was an example of that between the generals, between all the other various entities that, you know, we're really fighting him tooth and nail over some of the things he wanted to do on the foreign policy front. So, no, I don't even think that anymore. Unless you are in agreement with what they wants, your ability to affect your foreign policy goals and initiatives will be stymied or undercut at every turn. So, no, you have to agree with what they want if you're going to achieve anything as a president on the foreign policy front.

And Donald Trump really didn't agree with a lot of them. The thing that I will say this about him, Will, he was such an outsider that I don't think he fully understood his ability as an executive to actually implement some of these things where he could have taken a more aggressive stance. Again, he would have had, he would have been fighting these people every step of the way. Don't get me wrong. But I think that he has now learned a lot about how he can be more aggressive. and also understand, yeah, they're not on your team. They were never on your team. They're not going to be on your team.

And you're going to have to force them or fire them to actually accomplish what you want. Here's the question. I've been beating around the Bush on the current events. Who do you think is running the Biden administration? If we combine this limited power of the presidency with the knowledge, the common sense knowledge we all have, Joe Biden is not capable, literally, not mentally capable of really wielding the power that is within the presidency. Who do you think is running Washington, D.C.,

in 2022. If you were to ask me, again, an educated guess, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, obviously Barack Obama. I view this kind of as a third term of Barack Obama, his hope for revenge against Donald Trump. That's who's really, I think, making a lot of decisions. It's definitely not Joe Biden. He's a useful idiot in which they're using him to actually implement some of the things

they want to. So no, it's not Biden. It's got to be somewhere in the Susan Rice, Valerie, Jared, Barack Obama, zip code. Okay. And then let's bring the philosophy and the future together now. I believe you gave the answer at 50-50 earlier. Yeah. You know, I don't remember all the Republican presidential candidates who have advocated for a simple tax, a flat tax, a, you know, postcard size tax code.

But what you've described with the Leviathan, with the administrative state, is really an impossibility of, for example, trimming the tax code down to something so simple. Right. Do you think it is truly accomplishable? that Donald Trump could tame the administrative state, if given a second term. Is it truly realistic? I think he could take a legitimate shot, maybe not 800,000 removed, maybe a couple hundred thousand. The only way you're going to actually see significant breaking apart, listen, he has the ability through some executive orders to do some things that I think would be very beneficial,

of course, after four years. If Congress is not on board, they get revoked. the only way that you're going to see positive momentum towards this is when you have a Republican Party in D.C. led by those who accept this idea that the administrative state is a threat is not constitutional at all. And so when you have the executive branch and the legislative branch potentially combined in their pursuit of dismantling the administrative state, then you could have real progress. But you're not going to have that progress with a Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, who I think will be in the majority come January if they are not bought in. So I've even proposed that at some point in the not too distant future, if we want to see real positive momentum on this, you actually have to have America first leadership in the House and the Senate. And then you've got two of the three branches. And then I would argue actually, well, in closing, the third branch too with the Supreme Court, with the judicial, you might have a chance then if all three branches, because SCOTUS would

be for a lot of this, you'd have the legislative branch and the executive. And if you had four years of a clean shot. It's starting to break this apart. Yeah. But it has to be all three of those. And unless you have all three of them actually combined and all their force towards that, you'll see some with the Donald Trump administration, but not nearly what you could. Last question. Monarchy is ruler by a king. Oligarchy is ruled by the elite few. We at one time were intended to be a constitutional republic. What do you call this current form of government in America? Yeah, it's an oligarchy. I mean, when you look at really who's making the decisions

in D.C., in the corporate world, in tech, it's a really small handful of people that are deciding what happens in D.C., the free flow of information, freedom of speech online, all of these things. I definitely think we're definitely in that administrative state oligarchy stage. I'd be stretched to even say we're in the last days of a Constitutional Republic because we're living the progressive status dream right now. Ned Ryan, fascinating conversation. I'm glad it was more than three minutes and 50 seconds. Or 50 seconds. Yeah.

Thanks, Ned. Thanks, Will. Following Fox's initial donation to the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund, our generous viewers have answered the call to action across all Fox platforms and have helped raise $7 million. Visit go.com forward slash TX flood relief to support relief and rebuilding efforts. There you go. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Ned Ryan. Again, I'll talk to you a little bit later this week with a live report on the ground from Maui.

As always, I appreciate you, and I'll see you again next time. an ad free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts and Amazon Prime members. You can listen to this show ad free on the Amazon Music app. It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes. We ask people on the streets of New York City to play along. Let's see how you do. Take the quiz every day at the quiz.com.

Then come back here to see how you did. Thank you for taking the quiz.