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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
This house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey, today's episode, we're going to have a great time with Ashley Barnard.
Freedom Foundation, we're going to talk a lot about the things that are going on.
Really, this administration has tried to subvert everything, especially when it comes to COVID, and their ties to not only labor, but also special interests has really caused A lot of problems as we're seeing it in society, whether it's reopening schools, our businesses, where unfortunately the pandemic has become more of a political exercise for the Biden administration as opposed to actually getting real results and helping people.
So today I wanted to explore that a little bit, but also Ashley Varner is with us.
Ashley, welcome to the Doug Collins podcast.
Thank you so much for having us on, Doug.
Well, we're glad you're here.
And as I was joking before we started this off, a good Missouri girl here.
And I've got a lot of great friends out there.
Some of the more colorful characters in Congress are from Missouri right now.
Not only in the Senate, but in the House where I served with Vicki Hartzler, of course, Billy Long, Jason Smith, Ann Wagner.
I mean, there's more and I'm not wanting to leave any of them out.
But it's a great place and I've enjoyed my time out there.
Ashley, before we get started into the deep stuff, tell us a little bit about you, how you got started in politics.
Your bio is pretty cool, where it talks about you getting involved early and protesting outside your professors' houses.
Was that the way I interpreted that?
Well, no.
We were on campus, but we were right across the street from our professors protesting.
Yeah, I've been involved in politics from a young age.
I thank my mother for that.
She had Rush Limbaugh on in the house every day.
From the time I was nine years old, I was listening to him.
So I knew that I wanted to go into politics.
I thought that I wanted to get out of Missouri for a while.
St. Joseph was a small town for me at the time, and I just couldn't wait to get to Washington, D.C. Just as an aside, Doug, now when I explain the difference between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Washington, D.C. to each other, I say the difference is when you meet someone new in Washington, D.C., they ask, what do you do?
And they are sizing you up to see, are you worth my time?
Right?
And when you are in Missouri and you meet someone new and they ask, what do you do?
They mean, do you hunt?
Do you fish?
Do you have a boat?
Like, what do you do?
So that's the very stark difference between the two.
And I appreciate Missouri more and more as long as I've lived in the swamp.
But I got involved in politics.
I campaigned with my local Republican Party in the 1996 elections.
I'm still in high school.
I went to College Republicans at the University of Missouri.
I was the chairman of Mizzou College Republicans when 9-11 happened.
And we got flyers.
We saw flyers up around campus that two weeks after 9-11, there were going to be protests against any war, you know, food, not bombs.
And it was led by our professors in the political science department.
As chairman of College Republicans, I said, nope, let's get together.
We're going to have a campaign sign-making party, pizza, and we're going to make signs, patriotic messages, God love our troops, God bless the USA, and American flags, Gadsden flags, and that became an every-week event on Saturday mornings,
of course before you went to the football games, we stood across the street from our protestors or from our protesting professors outside the post office in Columbia, Missouri, and we stood there every week opposed to each other and each side would get honks as people drove by going to the post office, but it was fun.
They knew who we were.
They knew they had us in class.
I don't think they held it against us, but it was a good time.
And we just wanted to make sure that that patriotic message continued.
It continued through the rest of the school year, 2001 to 2002.
But Ashley, essentially, you should have to preface that, that they didn't hold it against you.
They should be proud of you.
That should be the very, I mean, we'll just chase a rabbit here because you mentioned hunting.
And I believe that rabbits good meat, too.
So let's chase one.
You know, why is it that we have become so closed off in our culture of college campuses, universities, where we have to have free speech zones, where we have to have, you know, tranquility moments, whatever it is.
Freedom of speech is the inherent nature of our country and it is inherently It's controversial.
It's adversarial.
Freedom, what you believe and what I believe may be different, but that's why we live in a country in which we have the right to do that.
And without freedom of speech, it actually hurts us more than it helps us.
How can we, and this is going to be a little bit of our conversation today, but let's go back to that for a moment.
You know, I believe that is hurting our political discourse.
It's hurting our country as a whole, where we have to have this freedom of speech or from speech is really what it's become.
Well, yeah, you know that the people who truly believe in freedom of speech, you and me, and most of the people who are classical liberals, we're not afraid of opposing views.
We're not afraid to have that dialogue.
But the totalitarian nature of those who want to quiet us, they are concerned about us getting our message out.
They are concerned, they are threatened by people hearing of you that doesn't come from them, that doesn't come from the top-down, you know, we are your betters, we are your And you need to listen to us and toe the line.
And so there's going to be a constant battle from those of us who just want everyone to be able to talk and hear and discourse and those who say, no, we don't want your kind here.
We don't want your views here.
Words are violence.
I remember growing up where sticks and stones were the ones that were going to break my bones, but words wouldn't hurt me, and that has been completely turned on its head today.
And the people in power want to maintain that power structure, and so they don't want other voices to be heard.
If you look at the undercutting of a civilization, the undercutting of a republic, and I think this is important to understand that we are a constitutional republic, and when you start undercutting the speech or isolating speech or framing speech in terms that are apart from whatever society should be,
then you're looking at it from a lens That is really hitting at the very core of who we are as a country, because the very core of our country was, from the very understanding of we the people, that there's a voice in there that people have the right to, and I've said it this way before, they have the right to stupid opinions, in my view.
For them, it may be very common opinions, I may be the stupid opinion, but that's inherently the simplistic version of the First Amendment.
Well, it is, and I have a wonderful friend I've recently rekindled with from high school, and We have started having these conversations over video chat, and we noticed that until we have gotten more comfortable talking with each other, she's on the left and I'm on the right.
I'm actually more libertarian.
But we preface our words.
Now, I don't mean to offend.
And then we were like, what are we doing?
We know we're respectful people.
We know we love each other.
Like, just tell me what you think, and I'm not going to be offended.
And that's what we need more of.
Well, it is.
And I made the comment, when I was in Congress, we were talking about this, I was on an interview with, yesterday, I can't remember, then they were talking about the issues of Congress, and I made a point, it was a longer form interview, and I made the point, I said, you know, my problem is I want people with conservative, libertarian, you know, I want people with views to actually stand firm in their views, but realize that Washington, especially the halls of Congress, is where you're supposed to get things done.
And I was very proud of the fact that we got a lot of things done in intellectual property.
We did it in music.
And I'm very proud of those bills.
And I'm also very proud of the fact they were bipartisan.
And the question was asked, well, who was your counterpart, so to speak, on some of these bills that you passed, like music, criminal justice, these things?
And I told him, Hakeem Jeffries.
And for a second it was like, Hakeem Jeffries?
And I said, yes, Hakeem Jeffries.
And I'll say it on this show.
Hakeem is a friend of mine.
I think Hakeem is wrong on 98% of his political views.
But he is, you know, that's why he gets elected in his district and I got elected in my district.
Is the views that we share.
But behind the scenes, what you just talked about, Hakeem and I could pick up the phone and he would say, Doug, you're being stupid.
And I say, no, Hakeem, you're being stupid.
And I mean that in a loving sense.
It was a true family.
I would never vote with him.
I disagree with him vehemently on things.
He disagrees with me violently on things.
But that is the essence.
When did we become this culture that believes that...
Governance is easy and that it's pretty and that it's nice.
I mean, go back to the Founding Fathers writing the Constitution.
How did we get that, Ashley?
I mean, this is you and me having a conversation now.
Well, it's refreshing to hear about you and Hakeem Jeffries.
I wish that more people knew that, actually, because I think it would break down some of the stereotypes we have of you guys not being able to talk once the cameras are off, right?
But it was messy in the beginning, right?
We had give me liberty or give me death.
They were shouting at each other.
There were some people whipping each other with canes on the Senate floor back in the 1800s, right?
So it was always kind of messy, but we allowed it.
We allowed the difference of opinion.
We could duke it out, have our conversations, and then as Ronald Reagan famously said, I argue with Speaker Tip O'Neill, but at the end of the day, you know, we can go have a beer or something.
And that's how it used to be.
That's how it should be.
I'll be honest, I don't know, you know, you tell me, since you were in Congress, you came from the Georgia State House to Congress.
Was it already that way when you got there?
Because I think a lot of things changed with the whole Swift Boat campaign of 2004 and John Kerry and the 527s, and then That's when I think we started seeing, if it hadn't started before, it started to happen then where the whole campaign finance rules came into place because they wanted to shut down opposition voices and they lost a race that they thought that they should have won.
And so then they wanted to clamp down and we've just seen more and more clamping down since then.
What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, no, and this is why I love this podcast, because this is exactly the reason.
This idea is extreme.
Yeah, I think there's two things right now, maybe three, depending on how we frame it, that are the cause of the divisiveness we see right now, especially on the national level.
Okay, and it's starting, and unfortunately, it is starting to bleed over into the state houses as well.
Let me give an example in answering that question.
When I was in the Georgia legislature, what most people didn't understand, and I was in there with, by the way, my name you may have heard of, Stacey Abrams, and I came in together, literally.
We were freshmen, and she was Democrat and I was Republican.
I became a governor's floor leader.
She was a minority leader.
I worked with Stacey on many things.
I think Stacey's changed, and I've said that I don't think it's the same person I knew in 2007. And I think politics have changed that.
But I say that to say that 95% of all the votes on the Georgia House floor Had less than five no's.
Less than five no's.
180 members, Republican, Democrat, but less than five to ten no's.
And what was funny about it was that those no's, most of them were Republicans.
Okay?
So it was interesting to see.
But we understood that the day-to-day work of this session through committees and everything else was inherently partisan but not partisan.
Now the bigger issues, those when they would be the 10% of votes that were partisan, those were the issues, guns, abortion, you know, things like, well, you expect that.
So when you go to Congress, you say, okay, well, we're going to get, and frankly, if you look at pure statistics, Congress gets a lot of things done in a bipartisan, what we call our supplemental calendar or our, you know, the Votes that take place when we first come in.
And they're all basically unanimous votes.
And they move through the House and then go typically to the Senate on unanimous consent.
That's probably the vast bulk of bills.
However, it seems like now that if there's anything of substance, it becomes R&D. Plain and simple, and you don't get anything done.
Now, to your question, where did that come from?
I think you're right.
I think it came from the perspective of the Internet.
And it became in the perspective of the way campaigns are inherently run these days.
And I think that's the two issues.
Internet being...
I interned in Washington back in the late 80s for a guy named Ed Jenkins.
He was my congressman from here in Georgia.
He was a Democrat.
That's all we had in Georgia.
I was there.
But he was the lead questioner of a congress of Oliver North in the Iran-Contra hearing.
So it was just an interesting time to be there.
But back then, people would send us mail, or they would make a long-distance phone call.
The feedback was not as quick.
The internet, email, other things, and the visibility of 24-hour news is the other part of that.
That's why I said there's two or three.
It has caused everything to become polarized.
You cannot have an MSNBC, a Fox News, a Newsmax, or an MSNBC or OAN or anybody else without having something to put in those hours.
And so everything becomes a controversy.
Everything becomes discussed about.
So I think that's your problem right now, is that people only hear What they want to hear.
And it's now become so polarized.
You talk about campaign finance.
I mean, again, when liberals many times want to fix something, they mess it up because they want too much control.
I mean, look at health care, all these things.
But my concern was is that actually...
But Republicans, McCain-Feingold, and all this campaign finance actually took the power away from the committees, took the power away from the parties themselves, and placed it outside the parties.
And I think that's one of the issues that we're dealing with.
I agree.
And I want to tell you, I also interned for a Democrat when I was in high school.
Pat Danner was my congresswoman, if you remember Pat Danner.
They thought I was so funny.
I interned in our district office in St. Joseph and I would be playing Rush Limbaugh while I'm in her office, taking constituent phone calls.
And so for my birthday, they would give me birthday cards with Rush Limbaugh on it.
They just thought it was the funniest thing that they had this little token Republican in their office.
I love it.
Okay, on a funny note, before we get into some of this other stuff, you were then, with your mom playing and giving a rough time frame of estimates, which we did not discuss how, frankly, how ancient I am.
You're going to out my age, yeah.
No, I'm not going to.
But you remember the Rush Rooms?
Yes.
Yes.
And I've mentioned that to some of my boys who grew up very conservative in politics.
They were born after the Rush Rooms.
But I can remember, because I used to travel and do sales and stuff.
It was early on when I was pastoring.
And I remember going to places in the local restaurants and holiday ends.
They would set aside a room where people would go for lunch and everybody would listen to Rush.
And that was part of the Rush to Excellence tour also, wasn't it?
Yeah, I think so.
It was pretty neat as we go along in that.
So I think the interesting point that we're making here is, and it leads to our later discussion, is this polarization into which ideas, Ashley, and one of the things I wanted, and I want to do this a little bit, and I forgot to tell us about Freedom Foundation and how y'all work in that, because I think it works very much into what we're talking about right here.
I think it does as well, Doug.
The Freedom Foundation is a national organization.
We're a non-profit group and all we do every day is strive to make sure that public sector employees know that they have a right not to pay union dues.
They don't have to be a union member as a condition of employment.
That is a fairly new affirmed right by the Supreme Court.
They only got the affirmation of the Supreme Court that they didn't have to be a union member in 2018. So for about 44 years prior to that, they could literally be fired from their job as a public sector employee paid by you and me, the taxpayers, if they didn't want to pay union dues.
And so the unions could force them to be fired.
They can't do that anymore, but who's going to tell them?
The unions aren't going to tell them they don't have to be a member.
Their government employer isn't going to tell them they don't have to be a member.
So the Freedom Foundation, we've really taken that as our mantle.
That is the one thing that we focus on.
And we have helped over 110,000 people since 2018 leave their government employee unions and stop paying dues to an agenda that only goes one way.
And I'll be honest, it's not just that we reach out to conservative-minded folks.
We reach out to everyone.
We just want every public employee to know you can keep that money for yourself.
You don't have to pay the labor leaders' lavish lifestyles and leftist politics.
But we even hear from Democrats who say, you know, I really appreciate that.
I might choose to give to this campaign on my own, but I don't want the union doing it with my money, with my paycheck.
I'd rather keep that paycheck and decide how much I want to give.
So we work with people across the political spectrum.
They just say, you know what?
I don't really think that my union is representing me all that well, or I don't really understand why they're getting involved in all of these political things.
They're supposed to be dealing with wages and labor and hours and things like that.
So we help them leave their union, stop paying dues.
We have operations in every state across the country.
But we started on the West Coast because that is definitely where it needs it.
So we started in Washington State, moved to Oregon and California, and now we are expanding across the country.
And I think that's so important.
Again, you're exactly right.
The union's not going to tell them that.
And right now...
In light of the most...
And I think this is an underreported part of this administration.
This is the most pro-union administration that we've ever...
I think, frankly, have seen since the really 60s, 50s, 40s.
I mean, the FDR, the Truman, you know, that kind of...
Joe Biden is very much enamored and very much union man.
Oh, he campaigned on it.
He said on the campaign trail in 2020, he was speaking at a labor rally to, I believe he was with Richard Trumka, an AFL-CIO, and he said, I promise to be the most pro-union president in this country's history.
And that is one campaign promise he has done quite well on.
He has held to that every step of the way, and he is promoting unions and he is making these unions, you know, a fourth element of government.
It is.
And as someone who, I mean, look, if people want to unionize, that's part of our country, that's their right.
But I think you're right in knowing the rights of non-members and members as well is something that's very important.
Back in the long time ago, early 80s, I went to work at a grocery store.
And it was a unionized grocery store.
It was a grand union, a big star, what we knew was a big star.
And the first thing that they, you know, I had to do was, quote, join the union.
Well, it was taking, and back then, this just shows you the discrepancy in time.
I think my three or four or five dollars a paycheck Came out of my, I mean, I wasn't making 50 or 60 bucks a week.
I mean, that was when I was working for almost 30, 40 hours.
And I kept saying, why are you taking this money?
I mean, I said, I'm not getting anything for this.
And what really was sad is about 10 years later, that company was bought by another union shop, AMP, what's the time?
They bought Big Star.
And all of those folks who had told me, yeah, Doug, the union will be there for you.
You just pay another deal.
The union dropped them like they had a bad disease, and some of the folks who were up and making $16, $17 an hour, they give them their job back at $9 an hour, $10 an hour.
And I thought to myself, I said, this union's leadership is fine, but their membership is missing it, and they've become more and more of a disconnect there.
Well, that's true.
And labor leaders, whether it's private sector or public sector, we only work on public sector union issues, but the leaders at the top, they don't feel the pain.
That their membership, their rank and file are feeling right now with Biden inflation.
They pushed for this presidency.
They knew that they were going to get what they wanted out of him every step of the way.
Their membership are hurting at the gas pump at the grocery store.
Their paychecks are worth less because of the massive inflation and the costs going up everywhere.
But it doesn't impact Randy Weingarten.
It doesn't impact Lee Saunders of Ask Me.
They're still making Big dollars.
You know, six-figure salaries while their rank-and-file members are just fighting to stay afloat.
Yeah, higher six-figure salaries.
So ask me and the others at NFT and Nancy Weingart.
We're going to get to that here in just a minute.
But one last point on that is I don't think people understand the extent...
Do you think it's a fair statement to say that the unions, except for Teamsters, I'll say that in that side with the trucking and some of those traditional industries, but the growth industry for unions is public sector?
The others are not.
That's true.
And you mentioned FDR. You know, FDR was not a fan of government employee unions.
He did not feel that it was appropriate for government to be negotiating with labor leaders over taxpayer dollars when there are no one else, you know, taxpayers not represented at the negotiating table.
He did not feel that was right.
For people who want to hold up FDR as a great labor president, he did not want the public sector employee unions to be as involved in politics as they are today.
But, yeah.
No, it makes it easier.
One of my first, and we're going to get into it because the House Republicans on the government oversight, House oversight, whatever they've renamed it to now, we're going to deal with this CDC AFT issue here in just a minute because the And I wanted to lay the groundwork for it because you have to understand the Biden administration's ties to union to then understand this breaking of tradition and breaking of policy that we saw with these COVID precautions and guidelines that were set out.
But one of the things that I saw, and I served on that committee for two weeks, For two years, my first two years there, was I was shocked to find out that there were eight, I believe it was eight different unions representing postal workers Well, if they're doing such a great job, why do we need eight?
Well, we couldn't figure it out.
And some had collective bargaining, some didn't.
But this shows you the ingrainedness in our federal government that you see in different levels.
And it also goes, one of the issues is that the unions, when we were dealing with preemoral justice reform, police reform, some of the very issues that some of the officers who needed to be fired We're being protected by their union.
They were being put on desk jobs.
There was a group, I think it's in New York or Chicago, I can't remember which, but they just sort of basically call it the Blue Room or whatever, where they have all these people who are quote on desk assignments with no job because of things that they did, but they can't be fired through the union process, so they just show up every day and get a check.
And this is a problem that we have to develop further in looking at how we just be honest about it.
And I think Freedom Foundation gives people the back and forth on that.
Taking off of that recently has come to light That at the CDC, which has been, you know, frankly, over the past few years a disaster when it's come to these COVID, and I think in the interest of just disclosure, have also been, and Dr. Redfin, who I knew before, and now especially the Biden CDC, Has caused more confusion than anything else.
And now we're starting to see a little bit of why that confusion was there.
And so I'll let you sort of lay it out and then let's unpack this, what we're seeing with the CDC and their connections to the AFT in these guidelines to reopen schools.
So yeah, what we found out with a committee report last week actually was we heard murmurings last year around this time that the AFT, the teachers unions, might have been a little heavy-handed with the CDC reopening guidelines.
We didn't have the details until about last week when this report came out.
And it turns out that the CDC vastly Left their typical protocol and they just gave over their draft document.
Sometimes they would give excerpts to an intergovernmental organization to review, but not the whole document.
But this is the CDC handing over the document to Randy Weingarten and saying, do you have any edits?
And they took almost verbatim, word for word, edits that Randy Weingarten's AFT put into place, which was...
Setting up a trigger so that schools could remain closed if a certain percentage threshold was reached with coronavirus cases in a certain area.
Also, including an entire paragraph of language inputting workplace protocols to ensure safety in the workplace, but setting up these These things like the screens, you know, between the kids and making sure that all the kids had to wear masks and the teachers had to wear masks.
All of these things.
Letting teachers who had gotten used to working from home to continue to do so.
Having Zoom school.
All of these things.
So, obviously, getting the kids back in class was not the priority.
Helping little babies learn how to read wasn't a priority because you're covering up their lips.
You're covering up the teacher's lips.
They can't see you.
They can't hear you through muffled masks.
Their education was not the priority.
It was the comfort of Randy Weingarten's members.
And I want to be very clear, Doug, we work with teachers all the time.
There are some amazing teachers across the country who just wanted to get back to the classrooms, and we'll talk about that more.
But there have been some activists in the teachers' unions across the country who used coronavirus as an opportunity to get bargaining chips that they would not have otherwise been able to do at the bargaining table.
Like the teachers' union in L.A. saying they're not going back to class until we get Medicare for all and we defund the police and we get rid of the resource officers out of our schools.
That has nothing to do with health care and safety.
So you had the Chicago teachers' union also saying that they were going to go on strike, and they did go on strike for several weeks at the beginning of this year because they had some demands that needed to be met.
And even that conservative stalwart, Lori Lightfoot, had to tell the teachers unions, get back to class.
Your kids need you.
So, the teachers union saw this as an opportunity to get concessions by holding our children hostage, unfortunately, and the damage that they have done to our kids, we will not know, I believe, for decades, actually.
It's very sad.
It is, but I had a superintendent who I've known for years.
We disagree on some.
I mean, he's been in public school system forever, but he's very good.
At the bottom line, he cares about the kids and the system that he has to work in.
And one of the things that he talked about, and we did a conference while I was still in Congress, as they were getting...
You remember we...
We shut down in the spring of 2020. Fall, the schools were going back in, so there's a discussion on how we were.
In our area, fortunately, they did a modified plan, but they were getting kids back to school.
It's still not what I wanted to see.
But one of the things he brought out was, he said, The upper end kids will be fine inherently.
The ones who have good parental support, if they have access to tutors, or they have the equipment, they will be able to get through this okay.
They're still going to suffer, but they're going to get through it okay.
He said the concern he had was the average student to the below average student, by some of these things being put in place, he said if they lose a half a year of school, it puts them a year back.
He said they lose a year worth of school, He said two to three years.
He said anything more than that, he said they never recovered.
Actually, this is tough.
How are we going to explain to a future generation that we allowed this kind of stuff from unions, which don't represent all teachers, by the way, to campus kind of input?
Well, I hope what they're doing is creating a whole new generation of small government people who want the government to tell them, get into their lives as little as possible.
I think I understand what the superintendent was saying.
But, you know, I know a lot of kids.
I live in the D.C. suburbs in Virginia.
And these kids who are graduating seniors, they miss their prom.
They miss their graduation.
They didn't get to walk.
They did not have those experiences that you and I got to have.
And then they went to college.
And, you know, a friend of mine is at UVA. His kid is at UVA, and they didn't get to go to class, so they were stuck in their dorm rooms for the first year of their college education, doing Zoom school as well.
The dining halls were closed, except for just a few hours each day.
This is not...
This is not education.
This is not life experience that they're supposed to be getting.
So I do think that the older kids, as far as the education they've already received and the life experiences they've had, they might be able to bounce back better.
And the little kids who, like I said, are still learning to read, are still learning their ABCs.
You've got to be able to see lips.
You've got to be able to hear voices clearly.
You can't be trying to watch your teacher behind a plexiglass, you know, 30 feet away.
It's going to be hard, and I'm worried that we didn't take more care to look at the suicide attempt rates, the overdoses, the increased drug and substance abuse.
These are the people who are going to lead us when we're older, Doug, and I'm very concerned about what we have done to their psyche.
I agree.
And as a point of that, the superintendent was very concerned about the socialized, but that's why he was trying to get them back into class.
He was more on the academic side, which we are seeing.
But we're losing a generation now.
Academics was hard enough.
The one that I'm concerned about most is the cheapening, and I think this is the only way to put it, and it comes from this education union.
They have college professors.
They have others as well.
But this idea of college students...
I had two boys at the University of Georgia during this time.
And...
For almost a year, we were still paying fees for food, and they weren't getting to go eat, and they were sitting in their dorm room, And the professors were not teaching the same way.
They were not, you know, it was not the same interaction.
So in essence, we, many parents, and I being included, feel like that we basically paid for two years to just go ahead and give me the piece of paper because the kids were not going to fail to start with.
Just give them the piece of paper, get them out.
Because it was almost like an abdication of responsibility to teach.
Well, and we've given them so much control at the professorial level, at the college level.
They get to call the shots.
And then, you know, we've got people in the squad clamoring to have all of those loans, you know, forgiven.
But we have allowed the teachers unions in the K-12 and the power that they get when they go to college, we have allowed that for decades.
And I think one positive thing About COVID and Zoom school is they overplayed their hand.
The teachers unions overplayed their hand and the activist teachers that there are out there.
Parents finally got to see what's really going on in the classrooms.
And they were appalled.
They were shocked.
They were infuriated.
And you now have an entire constituency of concerned parents from all walks of life, from all socioeconomic backgrounds, who are devastated to see what their kids have been being teaching, been being taught.
As we're talking about education, I didn't get that grammar correct.
But what they are being taught and being appalled by this and realizing this has been going on for longer than we've known.
But thankfully, the teachers unions kept schools closed because some in their membership wanted to continue to be able to do school while they were in Hawaii or while they were in Puerto Rico.
You know, the teachers' unions...
I'm not bashing teachers.
The teachers' unions put out to their membership, if you go on vacation, do not post about it on social media because that doesn't look good.
Well, of course it doesn't look good because when you're keeping schools closed, there are a lot of parents who have to stay home from work in order to make sure that their kid is doing okay and doing their lessons.
So they overplayed their hand.
They've woken up an entire class of parents who are not taking kindly to this.
They're not forgetting it.
And thankfully, we're seeing school boards across the country being turned over.
We are seeing people being ousted who did not have the kids' best interests for the last two years.
And parents are taking back control.
And that's, again, I live in Virginia.
This happened with Glenn Youngkin.
And if some people aren't going to take the lesson of Virginia and Glenn Youngkin, they're not going to have a very good election night.
No, and I think you've hit something there.
There's also another aspect of this, before we get back to this two intertwined version of AFT and the CDC, and that is I had friends who, of course, who lived in Virginia who were looking at it and viewed it as double taxation in the sense that they were now having to take their kids out of public school,
school put them in private school where they could actually get taught and so here they're paying taxes for a public education system but yet at the same point having to pay having to not the choice really anymore because if they wanted their kids to to succeed it was it was a it was not a choice anymore for that parent so they were paying a lot more in that list let's take a step back Ashley for a second Let's just say there's somebody out there saying, well, why wouldn't the teachers and all have a say in this?
Now, remember, I want everybody to understand on this podcast, the teachers' unions do not represent all teachers.
Not all teachers in this country are represented by unions.
In fact, here in the state of Georgia, there is no collective bargaining for teachers.
There's many states like that as well.
They have two groups down here that act like unions, PAGE and GAE. And I don't care if PAGE gets mad at me, they are a union.
They don't want us to think they are, but they are.
It's amazing when both GAE and PAGE had the opportunity to make progress a few years ago in the state legislature on one issue or keep their ability to take their dues out of teachers' paychecks.
Guess what they chose, Ashley?
Getting those dues dollars.
There you go.
That's what it is.
Look, I have no use for either one of them in that regard.
But what you're seeing is Why was this such a bad look?
And now that it's coming out, especially from, frankly, I believe that the CDC director, Rachel, she actually lied about this, in my opinion.
And I think this is a concern.
Why should people be worried about this?
Because if it's here, my next question is, where else is it?
Well, that's a great question.
That's exactly what I was thinking.
You were in my head.
Where else is it?
When we have something as important as our nation's health security, which everyone was saying, it's about the science, follow the science, Just listen to Dr. Fauci.
Listen to what the CDC experts are telling us.
They're trying to keep us safe.
This wasn't about keeping children safe.
This wasn't about Making sure that children got the best education they could while we figured out what to do.
I mean, everybody could be a little forgiving in the spring of 2020 because we didn't know what we were dealing with.
We didn't know quite what this was.
I think a lot of schools just said, let's just take an extra couple of weeks after spring break and figure this out.
But when you have the teachers union who has spent tens of millions of dollars to We're good to go.
And get something from the CDC, from the people in the Biden administration who know they have to listen to Randy Weingarten.
When she calls, you've got to pick up the phone.
When the AFT gets to tell the CDC, this is when we can say we can open the schools or close the schools.
This is what we want with regard to What we're going to require of the kids wearing masks, sitting behind plexiglass.
We can take Zoom school day whenever we want.
This is what we want because this is what some of our teachers want.
As far as bargaining chips, these are negotiating bargaining chips that you would otherwise go to your local school board and say, this is what the teachers in this area want, and you hash it out and you bargain over it.
They couldn't get things like this prior to COVID, and so they used the full weight of the federal government to impose this upon thousands of schools across the country.
And again, the damage that they've done, when you see States that said, no, we're going to get our kids back in school in fall of 2020, or a hybrid, like you mentioned.
We had a ton of states say, no, the kids got to get back to education.
And then you had all of these other blue states run by labor unions, run by these dollars, saying, no, we're going to shut down.
So now you have two different Americas of school kids.
And what was their experience?
Some kids got to go back to class and got to have all of those experiences and got to make sure that they were catching up on their education.
And then you have a second class of students in various pockets of the country that were prevented from doing that and are going to suffer for the rest of their lives if they don't get caught up because they're going to have to do the extra work.
They're going to have to do tutoring or the pod schools to make up for the education they were prevented from having because the labor unions wanted to call in their bargaining chips.
And this is, you know, it's sort of the perfect storm.
I did a podcast a couple of weeks ago.
I did a couple of parts of it dealing with some of these.
And that is, you know, the old axiom of Rahm Emanuel never let a serious crisis go to waste.
Wrote an op-ed about it because that's exactly what you see happening here.
In many ways, the AFT could not, and don't hear me, so anybody out there who's wanting to say, oh, Doug is saying that the teachers' unions were happy about the pandemic.
No, nobody was happy about the pandemic.
What they did, though, was leverage, as you said earlier, this pandemic to gain, I mean, why would you want to remove a school resource officer?
I mean, these same teachers, I mean, especially in high schools, Where there is, you know, not just the violence or the fear of a school shooting or something like that.
You have just regular fights and other things that go on, drugs and things that are in schools.
It just, again, this warped sense of liberalism is amazing.
But what bothered me as we got into this report is the, not only did they, I mean, they It's becoming clear they wrote a lot of this report.
Rachel Lewinsky took this report, gave it to them.
And then what bothers me is what I've seen in many administrations, but the Biden administration is really good at this.
When asked about this, the council instructed the witness not to answer.
Yes.
What are they hiding there, Ashley?
I mean, is it because they're afraid of civil suits?
I mean, look, for the most part, the government's going to be protected.
That's probably not going to happen.
What are they really scared of here?
I think they were really caught off guard by the parental anger that really fomented across the country.
It lit a fire under people who just, they just assumed they were going to give their kids education over to the school systems and the teachers unions.
And they were just going to trust that what their kids were being taught was what they needed to learn.
And again, they overplayed their hand by keeping all of these schools closed and keeping classroom instruction streaming into dining rooms and living rooms across the country.
And they awoke a sleeping giant.
I think they were really caught off guard by the anger of the parents.
And parents starting to go to these school board meetings.
Loudoun County is just down the road from me.
That was the epicenter of the parental school choice movement, the school board movement.
And it has burned across the country.
In people's minds and hearts, they are angry and they are tired.
Well, this goes back to the teachers.
Teachers have been thrown under the bus.
They have been made to look like the enemy.
They have taken the brunt of this and they're tired of it.
That's why we are literally hearing from thousands of teachers who are sick and tired of being thrown under the bus.
They don't want Randy Weingarten speaking for them.
They don't want to be associated with the leftist politics at the top of the teachers' unions, and that's why they want out.
They want to stop paying Randy Weingarten's salary because she doesn't speak for them.
But they are the ones who get blamed for it at the local levels.
And I think that they were surprised, and so now they're trying to suppress the evidence that they really did hand the CDC guidelines over to Randy Weingarten and say, what edits do you have?
We'll make them.
Okay, this is going to...
I can't wait to get the feedback on this next line, of course, that I'm getting ready to...
But as a...
One of the things that I've not shared on this podcast, but I've shared in other podcasts, my wife was a teacher for 30 plus years in the public school system.
She retired, unfortunately.
For her, the retirement was during 2020. She had already scheduled to retire.
For me, it was heartbreaking to see someone who had put their life, soul, everything, including me, into their classroom for 30 plus years.
Her retirement ceremony was cars driving by our house and honking the horn.
I mean, it was just...
Brutally sad in that regard and I felt so bad for her.
But I watched her struggle through a lot of the regulations and look, some of it was brought on by Republican administrations.
No Child Left Behind was a disaster in so many ways.
We're getting better at teaching tests, but we're getting terrible at teaching logic and critical thinking and the things that matter.
But one of the other issues that is concerning, and your organization, you know, is offering and talking to how you don't have to pay, you know, you don't have to be forced into the, especially the public sector, teaching jobs to pay the union dues.
Well, one of the issues, and just a question here, I've talked to many teachers who the only reason they pay, like here in Georgia, for instance, they pay PAGE or GAE dues, is the malpractice, the lawyer part of that.
Has anything been done?
Does Freedom Foundation deal with it or others?
Say, look, you know, I understand why, but if you want that option to have a low-cost, you know, There are actually a number of organizations that are popping up.
Some have been around for longer than you thought.
And I hate to mention one or two because I know that I'll leave several out.
There are alternatives to teachers' unions, and they provide the same liability insurance at a lower cost.
Teachers have no idea of this because that is beaten into their head by the teachers' unions.
Well, you won't have any liability insurance if you leave us.
Because for all of their anti-bullying campaigns, Doug, teachers' unions are the biggest bullies in this country, I think.
And they will put the fear...
Well, you're going to be standing alone.
That is not true.
And so I do invite teachers watching your podcast, go look up alternatives, just, you know, teacher association alternatives.
There's one, I believe it's called American Association of Educators.
There is, and I apologize for forgetting the name of it, there is a Christian-based educator association that provides these benefits, again, at a lower cost to the teachers' unions because they only provide the benefits that they are selling you.
They do not then also use that money for politics, for lavish conventions.
So you will save money, get out of the teachers' union, find one of these alternative organizations.
You will get that liability insurance.
Well, I think that's the important decision.
Ashley, the more and more it's concerning, I think the biggest thing that we've hit on today was the fact that in their zeal to use the circumstances to their advantage, they also opened up their underbelly a little bit because parents could see into it.
What just offended me greatly, and it was sort of hilarious, because I was used to, and I say this because I have one too, so I'll just say the egos of Capitol Hill.
Okay, we all have them.
Okay, and I don't care who you are.
You have them.
But Congress and Senators and staff members on the Hill, I mean, there's all that don't tell us, you know, the unwashed masses kind of thing.
You've heard this all along.
But it's who we serve.
I've always believed that my greatest gift was being able to represent my constituents and listen to them.
And now this has been exposed.
And in looking at how the Teachers unions now deal with this and how the parents are now sort of taking us back.
What offended me, and we'll sort of close it up, and you mentioned Loudoun County, and there's a couple of those school board members who basically said, and I'm paraphrasing, but said, how dare you question us?
You're a school board member!
I mean...
You paid $50 or whatever it was to run for an office in which you get paid maybe $15,000, $20,000 a year.
And some of you aren't even educators.
And look, I'm proud you're serving.
But those parents who come to those meetings, they have a big investment in why they're there.
It's called their children.
And some of the board members don't even have children.
Exactly.
Or here's the better one.
I've actually had school board members who actually sent their kids to private school.
And served on public schools boards.
Are you kidding me?
Rules for thee, but not for me.
Exactly right.
Ashley, as we close up here, what's the one thing that you would say for people to look at this and take away, be concerned about, or look for as we go into this?
More and more of this is unveiled.
Well, again, I want to stress we help teachers every day get out of the union.
We've helped thousands since the COVID lockdowns happened.
Teachers have been calling us around the clock.
We're helping them out.
Freedomfoundation.com.
Go there and we're happy to help you across the country.
I think that we have reason for hope this year because, again, I didn't expect Doug in November of 2021 to go to bed knowing who my next governor was going to be in Virginia.
I had no anticipation that I would even know when I woke up that morning.
But Glenn Youngkin provided the map, the road map.
It's about parents.
It's about parental control of their kids and education.
It's about providing them with a voice.
Don't leave them out.
Now, teachers still have a voice, but they can't be the only voice, right?
And parents have got to be able to weigh in on their children and what their children are doing and how they're learning.
And we are seeing it still.
There have been school board elections in various pockets of the country, both in November and since then, where they have overturned school boards in Texas and I believe in Wisconsin and Arizona.
And we're going to have more of those take place.
So it's enough to be infuriated by it, by what's happened.
But going forward, we have empowered parents to take a look at what's going on, to take action, to show up, and then to vote people out of office who don't have their kids' best interests.
I have a lot of hope for this year.
I think it's going to be...
Well, a lot of people...
Only really a couple of areas of the country got to vote last year.
And because of the way the election cycle...
Virginia is always one of the stranger times frames of election.
They always come right after the election of the president, so it's always that sort of interesting transition year.
Not a midterm, but them in New Jersey.
But now, like in Georgia, many other places across the country in which I speak, is the main election cycle year.
This is the year you're going to have some of those for the first time coming up, so I think people getting involved.
Folks like Freedom Foundation help in that regard, especially for teachers.
Ashley, it's great to have you on the show today.
Look forward to talking to you more in the future.
I would love that, Doug.
Thanks so much.
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