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Jan. 17, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:50
Making Liberty Work For The Future - With Guest Connor Boyack

Connor Boyack is the founder of the Libertas Institute and the author of the highly influential "Tuttle Twins" series of books geared toward teaching young people about freedom and liberty. Don't miss this special interview.

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Time Text
Promoting Liberty 00:14:36
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host, Daniel.
Welcome to the program this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Good.
You know, we have a special guest today.
I noticed that.
Somebody that's been working in the trenches to promote the cause of liberty.
So he's our friend.
So he's here today.
His name is Connor Boyak.
And I've known of him and known him for several years now.
He knew about the time when I was a presidential candidate and that sort of thing.
And he also has a person with him today that people will know about him because he's the illustrator for much of your activity and that he works with the Tuttle Twins and all those.
And so that's a lot of work.
So our special guest that we're going to ask a lot of questions to and see if he can answer all the questions.
And that will be for Connor.
Connor Connor's here and he's just come in from Utah.
That's right.
I've been to Utah.
Yes, you have.
So Connor, welcome to our program today.
Thank you for having me, Dr. Paul.
It's always an honor.
And Elijah and I, Elijah's off screen.
Maybe we'll Photoshop him in later.
Very excited to be here and chat with you.
It's very, very good.
Now, yeah, you know, I tried to make you the hit piece today.
All week we've been promoting, and they say, what, what?
We want to know about the election, don't we?
But I'm just kidding, because we watch the elections because we have to keep up and then we make our comments and we're free to do that.
But you must have, you can't avoid it.
You must have heard there was an election that went on.
Did that get you excited?
Or do you say, why are we paying so much attention?
How do you feel about all that?
I was watching it far more closely back when you were running for office.
These days, less so.
My challenge, I think, with elections is that they can be very distracting.
A lot of people focus on them.
They get excited by them.
And rightly so.
I mean, they're important.
But at the end of the day, I think people can make more impact in their community and in their family.
And so that's what we're about is trying to empower people to say, like, yes, pay attention to the election.
Sure, vote.
But don't let that consume all of your political energy.
There's so much that you should be focused on in your own home and your community.
Yeah, and voting is a consequence of that other activity in education.
And that's one of the things that has attracted me to and got attention on what you're doing because to me, you're getting, you're dealing with education and you're starting at an early age.
And more so than a lot of others have.
We know it's important and the enemy knows it's important to deal with the very young to indoctrinate.
And unfortunately, I would say that we've been losing the battle to the indoctrinators in the government schools.
So that's why I was delighted to see what's happening here.
So tell us a little bit about how you got started.
Was there a motivating factor?
Had you thought about this for five years and then decided to do it?
Did somebody else prod you into it and make a suggestion?
What happened?
So I started my organization, Libertis Institute, in 2011.
And my children were very young at the time.
A few years into doing this work, my kids were five and three.
And I found that when I would come home at the end of the day, I would ask my kids, you know, what did you do today?
How was your day?
And they would tell me in very simple terms, I watched this cartoon or I played with this toy.
But my five-year-old, when he was almost six, he started to turn the question to me, Dad, what did you do today?
Where were you?
And I found myself wanting to share with him what dad did.
Hey, I was fighting eminent domain at City Hall, or I was combating this socialist legislation.
So around this time, Elijah and I were talking about what would it look like to do a kids' book.
I had gone to Amazon.
I was trying to find books that teach liberty to kids.
There was nothing.
And so Elijah and I said, let's do a book.
Let's just see what happens.
There was no vision for this, for what it's become.
There was no idea of how big it would be.
But we decided to do our first book.
We launched it in 2014.
The reception was amazing.
And to us, that was the vote of confidence that we should do another one and then another one.
And so it slowly evolved over time until 2020 when the world fell apart.
Now so many families came to us for books and curriculum.
And so we've really exploded since then and it's been going great.
I want to get Daniel involved here a little bit.
Daniel, have you any questions about how I got started?
Because, you know, we've started a few things and sometimes politically, in a way, unfortunately, politics gets a lot of attention real fast.
That's why I thought it was so important to be involved in education.
How about your thoughts?
Because you've gone through the process now.
He's really responsible for the Ron Paul Institute.
And he might be able to tell you a little bit how that came about.
Well, I mean, as a practitioner of parenthood, as you were, you know, it obviously what you've done really strikes a chord.
And I remember very early on when the law came out, the Tuttle Twins, the law, I think you passed out copies to basically everyone who came through in any office and passed it around.
And I realized about five, six, seven, eight years ago maybe, we were in Houston at a homeschool store where we go for our homeschooling supplies and there's a huge display of all the Tuttle Twins books.
And I thought, okay, this is great.
This is teaching young kids liberty.
And Mayberry's books were there as well.
So, I mean, I guess my question is an obvious one, but you started the Libertas Institute, but at some point you started focusing on the youth and on teaching young people about liberty, about economics.
What was your thought process?
At what point did you say, we hit it, this is it, this is what we want to do?
Well, in the early days, it was all experimental.
It was just, for Elijah and I, it was a labor of love.
It was a side project for both of us.
And it was slow going in the early years.
You know, people would spread it through word of mouth.
They would pop up in stores like Daniel just mentioned.
But again, I think for both of us, Elijah and I, 2020 was the turning point.
There were so many families that were saying, what do I do?
Now I'm homeschooling my kids.
Where do I go?
What curriculum can I use?
And that's when the word of mouth exploded because we had enough of a base of support that they could refer all their friends and tell them, oh, go get the Tuttle Twins curriculum, go get the Tuttle Twins books.
So hopefully we don't have another pandemic anytime soon to spread the word even more.
But that was a huge silver lining for us.
I mean, let me give you a little snapshot.
This will help illustrate it.
When we started in 2014, all the way through 2019, we sold a total of about 750,000 books.
And it was a tiny little self-published thing.
We were very happy by that number.
In 2020 alone, we sold 1.3 million books, which was nearly double of the entire past history.
So the toothpaste is out of the tube.
A lot of people are now learning about these ideas.
And I get excited thinking about who are the future Ron Pauls out there that we're planting all these seeds at a young age, helping these kids learn these ideas when they're young.
Well, I thought maybe Carol gave you a hint to this because you told me a little story about the first time you were out on the road promoting the law.
And how did that go, once again, with Carol?
So Elijah and I were at Freedom Fest in 2014.
This is where we launched the first book.
It's based off of Bastiat's The Law.
And we only had one book.
No one knew who we were.
Tuttle Twins was brand new.
And we were sitting at the booth trying to promote it at this conference.
Elijah, I think, was off doing something else.
I was sitting behind the booth and I received an email notification alerting me that a sale had happened on our website.
We had set up tuttletwins.com and every few hours we would get a purchase.
Because again, brand new.
I get this email.
I'm sitting behind the booth and I look it up.
Someone had ordered 50 copies of it.
Oh boy.
And I scroll down more and it says Ron and Carol Paul.
I'm like, whoa, whoa, wow.
So for both of us, that was important validation that like, you know, we're onto something here.
And so since then, we've done books based off of Mises and Hayek and Rothbard.
And we've done iPencil by Leonard Reed.
And so trying to bring these ideas that have been accessible to adults, bring them down to a younger age, too.
Carol doesn't make major claims about being involved in politics, but she has good instincts.
And I listen carefully.
But no, so things like that are very important because it sent a message to you.
There is a market out there.
So that was pretty neat.
So do you have a single book that you're working on right now, similar to the booklet?
Let's go out like that for Tuttle Twins book?
Yeah, so for those who don't know, we have books for toddlers.
We have our main books, which are for elementary and middle school age, and then we have books for teenagers as well.
Right now, what Elijah and I have been working on over the past few weeks is our next children's book.
This one is going to teach about Marxism.
And we're going to use material from Thomas Soule, who's written a lot about this.
And we're going to teach kids about what Marxism looks like.
Even with things today like ESG and DEI and all this unfairness that we see, we want to help kids understand kind of the Marxist roots, the class warfare, the oppressor versus the oppressed.
And so hopefully that book will be out in a few months.
But that's what we're actively working on right now.
Very good.
And Daniel, do you have questions for follow-up?
Well, I think it's maybe your most recent title, but it certainly caught my attention, which is The Tuttle Twins Guide to True Conspiracies.
That's taking on a big deal.
And just having that title is, you know, it's very attractive.
Tell us how that came to be and tell us some of our true conspiracies.
Wow.
Okay, so this was a very fun book for Elijah and I to do.
There's a lot of conspiracy theories out there.
For this particular book, we wanted to focus on 20 actual provable conspiracies, something for which there's documentation.
And so we compiled a list.
And for us, the goal here is to help, this is a book for teenagers, by the way.
This is in our teens series.
Our goal is to help teenagers develop critical thinking.
Because if we can show them, look at all these shenanigans from the past when all this corruption has happened, then I think we can prime them to more easily understand that that type of corruption is happening today.
And let's be on guard against it.
I'll give you a little snapshot.
Both of you are well aware of this story, but this is one of the ones that I like to share.
The way I tell the story is that during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK is in office.
There was this fringe group of radical activists who wanted to go to war in Cuba.
They wanted to invade.
At the time, American polling showed that they didn't want to go to war.
No one wanted to trigger World War III.
And so, but this group did, these radical activists, they somehow got an audience with JFK himself to pitch their plan.
Their plan was, let's bomb American cities, let's shoot down planes, let's shoot rafts full of people fleeing Cuba in search of freedom.
Let's do all of this, but make it look like the Cubans themselves are the ones doing the shooting and the killing so that we can blame it on Cuba, we can enrage the American people, and then they will demand that we go to war.
JFK shot down the proposal from this group of radical activists.
And so when I tell this story, I then give the reveal at the end.
Who was this group of radical activists?
You guys probably already know it was the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States military.
This is called Operation Northwoods.
You can find the declassified memo online.
And so we've got 20 stories like this in the book that are just so eye-opening for people who never learned in their own history books in school that anything like this happened.
It's great that you do that.
I mean, it's great that you have it on foreign policy.
I see you have the Iraq War, the Naraya story, which is great.
It's good for young people to understand that the government lies to them continuously.
And sometimes, I mean, I'm a homeschooler as well.
And sometimes you can forget that most kids that go to school don't get this.
I mean, I have to almost calm my kids down because they hate government so much.
Take it easy, kids.
It's like telling them Santa Claus isn't real.
You're like, you can't tell your peers.
Yeah, exactly.
Don't go talk to people.
Deep it down.
But I think it's great for kids to understand that it's a real wake-up call to see that this does happen.
And so when the next, like you were talking about the COVID, well, their reaction should immediately be what ours was, which is, okay, they're lying about this probably.
Or when they say, you know, even things in the headlines, Ukraine, stuff that's going on in the Middle East.
Well, what's their angle?
You know, how are they lying?
So I think that's a great thing to do.
Well, you know, I think it's important, dividing up and understanding conspiracies pro and negative.
And I use this a lot and say, in a way, we all conspire.
I would say right now we're sort of conspiring how we're going to promote what we believe in.
But that's a big jump.
And once you use that word, but then it's truth through fiction.
And that's what we're seeking the truth.
But what happens is if somebody from one party starts to make plans and they're honest, the other side can twist it around and say, oh, they're conspiring with the Russians.
And it's sort of the analogy you had with Cuba.
Another term where that happens, I think, is propaganda.
They'll say, like when we started the teletrines books, we were accused, even by conservatives and libertarians, of creating propaganda.
Propaganda and Perception 00:11:12
Like, oh, we don't need this for kids.
You know, let kids be kids.
Don't teach them this stuff.
And I used to resist that term.
Oh, ours isn't propaganda.
We're just empowering parents to talk to their kids about these ideas.
We're not trying to go after the kids directly.
But in the years since, I've leaned into the term propaganda.
I admit outright now, yes, this is propaganda, because you have to realize everything is propaganda.
What is propaganda?
We often use it in the negative term, but propaganda is really just the propagation of ideas.
Someone is transmitting ideas.
So parents need to realize that if they are not involved in propagating the ideas that they believe in, their children are going to develop their worldview from other people's ideas, and then the parents are going to be shocked.
So we're trying to tell the parents, get involved and educate your own kids.
Okay, what kind of problems have you run into who would resist you and try to close you down or squeeze you out or bad mouth you?
I'm sure there was some.
But tell us what has happened, if anything's happened, because most people, I have the impression that you're probably in a friendlier territory in Utah than if you were doing this in San Francisco.
Well, very fair point.
I mean, this is a national project.
So it's all, in fact, we translate these books now into about 13 languages.
So the books are going all over the world.
So in that sense, we can avoid a San Francisco or a Washington, D.C.
We do have haters.
I'll give you one fun example.
You know, they're typically socialists and progressives, and they used to say, oh, why are you trying to brainwash kids?
Well, now we see that the left, so-called, is brainwashing kids all the time with these kids' books.
And so now it's open field.
No one is really attacking us anymore for talking to kids.
Everybody is transparently doing it now.
A couple years ago, CNN came after us.
They wrote an article where they accused us of creating what they called a right-wing children's education complex.
If only.
And so they issued this whole article.
So we took a screenshot of the article.
Here's CNN attacking us.
We plastered social media with it.
We sent it to our whole email list.
And we directly let everybody in our community know, check out CNN attacking us.
And then we created a coupon code.
It's not valid anymore, but at the time it was 50% off the books using coupon code CNN.
We sold over 100,000 books in one weekend as a result of CNN attacking us.
So that's when I tell my friends, if anyone has any contacts at MSNBC, get them to pile on us as well.
That would be super helpful.
In your brochures, you mentioned you deal with the free market and property rights and civil liberties.
And we've already talked about your interest in foreign policy.
But is there one of those groups that you have mentioned and we've talked about that is harder to sell than any other?
And what has that been?
Because I have people come up and say, Ron, especially in the campaign, they say, Ron, we really like you, really, really like you.
But you don't want to bomb and kill a lot of people like we do.
They'll bring up something.
We have that too.
Some of our books are less political than others.
For example, the book, we actually did a book, you may recall, based off of your book, A Foreign Policy of Freedom.
So this book is called The Tuttle Twins and the Golden Rule, which is all about the non-aggression principle and the golden rule.
And I share that example, both because you're in it, so it's relevant, but also that book is one of a few books we have that are less political because every parent wants their kid to learn, every good parent wants their kid to learn the golden rule.
And so we just say, oh, there's a twist to it called the non-aggression principle, and here's how it applies.
And so books like that, we have found have a broader audience than our economic books or our more political books.
And so we're able to take little books like that and get them into communities that otherwise might resist some of our ideas.
Another fun thing for us was when we did a book based off of Rothbard's Anatomy of the State.
And so here's a book talking about anarcho-capitalism and the evils of the state.
And we said, all right, let's do a children's book based off of Rothbard.
And we thought that our own audience was going to have problems with this because much of our audience is traditionally conservative.
They're not libertarian.
They believe in freedom.
They love Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln.
But they love freedom enough that they're very warm to getting our books.
And then we can introduce these seeds of more libertarian thought.
We thought, if we do a book on Rothbard, anarcho-capitalism for eight-year-olds, surely we're going to have some upset parents who are not going to like that and who are in our own community of right-of-center people who are not going to like it.
We did not get a single complaint.
Quite the opposite.
Parents are like, wow, this is a really interesting idea.
And I'm so glad that you turned this into a story.
So what I love about what we do is that it has a very broad audience.
And because we've simplified these ideas, it's not like we're taking economics in one lesson and telling someone to read this thick book.
Instead, these are just simple stories.
And so they find a far broader audience than I think a lot of books otherwise would.
I remember early on, because I was curious about how the world works and economic policy.
And yet, if I'd go to high school, college, or whatever, and keep bringing economic, I just don't get it.
I just don't get it.
It seems so boring.
And then further on, you get to the people who really move on.
They understand really complicated math.
They understand how people act.
Boy, you have to know a lot of math.
And then that was crazy.
So the discovery of Austrian economics, it's exciting.
And the other thing that's exciting, and I found this in the campaigning, is how young people, and you deal with young people, and they can sort it out.
They don't have to have a PhD.
Matter of fact, they're better.
I tell people that I'd much rather convert 12-year-olds and people who belong to the Chamber of Commerce because they've been influenced by lobbying and all that.
So they respond well to truth.
And I think that's why the resistance is a little less than we might think it should be because we think in terms of what we've been facing.
So I was so delighted, but I still would ask kids come up and they say, we really like what you said.
Yes, it, but the other guy just said the same thing.
You know what they say?
They say, yeah, but we didn't believe him.
Yeah.
It's so interesting to me when you have dynamics like that.
I remember that about your campaign.
It was very heavily skewed with young people.
And it was, I think, a testament to the fact that young people can see through the BS, I'll call it.
They can see through when they're being lied to.
They know that these people have been manipulating the system.
The system is rigged.
And so the young people, I think, are very open to these ideas.
I will add, though, that even though these are children's books, what we're finding is that well over half of the parents who get our books for their kids tell us that they are learning new things for the first time.
That's correct.
And so these are parents who, you know, maybe went to public school.
They maybe have read some of these books, but they don't understand these ideas deeply.
And when we simplify it for them like this, we're educating whole families rather than just the kids or just adults as well.
Right.
I think we focus so far on the books, and that's great.
But you also, you're the founder of the Libertas Institute.
So why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
I think you focus on kind of Utah-centric legislation, if I'm not mistaken.
Tell us a little bit more about that.
Yeah, that's where we started.
So we started as a think tank in Utah, and now we've spread across the country.
And so my feeling there, like Dr. Paul, you were talking about the importance of education when everyone is so focused on the political side.
I believe, though, that the purpose of education is action.
The reason why we are teaching these things is not just so that they feel good and they're warm and fuzzy, right?
We want people to get out and change the world and improve things and build things.
And so to me, having an action component is important, and that's where Libertas Institute comes in.
So we'll take families who are learning about these ideas, and then we'll partner them with groups working in their community at a legislative level.
We can say, hey, someone's trying to ban homeschooling in your state.
Let us help you figure out how you can go, you know, legislatively try and stop it.
But everything is at a state level.
Notwithstanding Dr. Paul and his son and a few others who are in DC doing good things, most of them are just perpetuating all these problems.
And it's very hard to affect change at a federal level.
By contrast, at a state level, I mean, we've changed well over 100 laws.
Many of them were their first of their kind in the whole country.
And I'm a nobody.
I used to be a web developer.
My profession, when your campaigns were happening and I was first getting involved in politics, I built websites for a living.
I have no formal background in economics.
I didn't like my college economics class because it was all supply and demand charts and everything, right?
And I didn't have a training in law or anything like this.
I just wanted to get more involved and figure out what my place in the world was.
And so to me, it's a testament that families all over the country, even though they have no formal training or background, if they learn these ideas and if they're pointed in the right direction, they can accomplish a lot of good too.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was just a little follow-up.
I was looking at your bio and I can't escape this because my wife always complains I don't have any hobbies.
I said, work is my hobby.
But you have something on your bio that I've always wanted to do and I have to ask you about it and that's bees.
Are you still doing it?
Tell me a little bit about it.
Yeah, I love beekeeping.
I say that I'm an outlaw beekeeper because in Utah, in many states, but in Utah where I live, there's a law that requires you to tell the government where your hives are.
You're supposed to register your hives with the state.
I don't do that.
Many people don't do that.
That's why I call myself an outlaw beekeeper because I'm practicing some civil disobedience.
Bees to me are a fascinating creature.
They're very, you know, us as libertarians, we can get very individual, focused, very self-sufficient and rugged.
Bees are this collective community where they all have their role.
They're working together really well.
It is kind of a dictatorship because you've got the queen in charge of everything, you know.
And I just find them very fascinating.
I'm like you.
Work is my hobby.
This is like the one thing that I do that's not work related.
Well, I'm going to talk to you later because I want to get into that.
Now, on one item I want to ask you about is, you know, the libertarians, if I ask this question 20 years ago, some people say, well, we just can't handle lately.
In later years, it was the foreign policy.
We have a question.
But early on, it was the civil liberties and drugs.
Does that ever come up or do you avoid it on purpose?
Or is it one of the toughest ones to deal with?
It is tough.
Last Five Minutes 00:02:50
Where I've seen the most success is when I focus on issues where there's a lot of common ground.
So I don't hide the fact that I want to legalize drugs, you know, not because I think people should use them, but because I think the war on drugs is so violent and counterproductive.
So I don't hide the fact that I have these beliefs, but I try through Libertis Institute and through our Tuttle Twins books as well, I try to focus on things that can be very attractive to people.
I want to lead people into the movement.
I find that much of our libertarians are alienating to people.
They're very dogmatic.
They're very combative.
And I used to be that way too.
I used to be a keyboard warrior, you know, debating people.
But I found so much more success when I can be inviting to people, when I can have something that's family friendly.
Like if you go around saying, let's legalize all drugs, that's not something they're going to talk about over the dinner table.
Okay, I'm going to make one state one and we'll get some more information from you.
But I think it's interesting that people, when I gave a lot of speeches, I talked, you've heard a couple.
You know, I talked about this a mess.
And this is dangerous.
War is terrible.
And depressions are terrible, you know, all that.
And yet the last five minutes of an hour speech, I'm going to tell them.
But guess what?
The answer is it's not complicated.
And the thing that pleased me most, and it was sort of fell into place because I wasn't planning a speech.
You know, it was just coming from my spontaneity.
And they said, well, we like what you're doing because you're so optimistic.
So they heard the last five minutes that there was hope.
And I always try to rationalize that.
I said, maybe what happens is they recognize what I'm saying.
Yeah, that's true.
You know, and then they'll listen to the solution.
And all of a sudden, so I'm always amazed that, I'll bet you run into a lot of parents that are optimistic.
I've had some of the parents bring kids to my office after I was in the campaign.
And the kids brought the parents.
They used to be the parents brought the kids.
And I always thought, and I brought it up one time with a group.
I said, well, how do you handle this?
Your kids are teaching you?
And they loved it.
They were so proud of their kids.
And you probably have read them.
I've seen a lot of that too.
I think you're exactly right.
Parents don't want their kids to dwell on negativity and pessimism.
There's many problems in our world.
I was just telling Elijah on the drive over here how my son the other day was venting about housing prices.
He's 14.
And he's saying, how am I going to be able to afford a house?
You know, there's a lot of reasons to be negative.
And so I think families are clamoring for positivity and hope.
And, you know, we can talk about elections.
Families Clamoring for Hope 00:02:05
We can talk about laws and Congress and everything else.
But that's where a lot of our problems are.
Our hope and our opportunity is at the family level.
Dr. Paul, you've probably heard this quote.
I'll share this before we wrap.
That politics is downstream of culture.
That's a very well-known quote.
A lot of people talk about that.
But I have an addendum to that that I think is even more important.
Yes, politics is downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of the family.
And in our movement for a very long time, we have not really focused on the family.
We've spoken to adults.
We've tried to influence culture a little bit.
What Elijah and I and our team are doing with Tuttle Twins in particular is trying to go even more upstream beyond culture and say, let's support the family.
Let's get them talking about this stuff over the dinner table.
That's where I think we save our country.
Not at Congress, not in the courtroom, but at the family dinner table.
Daniel, do you have a final, okay?
We're going to close shop here now, but get the message out there.
You have a lot of things you've done in Ephesus.
The simple, clear-cut thing, if they're out there, one, two, this is what you can do to follow up and continue to follow what you're doing.
Absolutely.
So for the Tuttle Twins books, that's tuttletwins.com.
You can find all of our books there.
We've got a cartoon and curriculum and all kinds of stuff.
We're all over social media as well.
If you're interested in the policy side, I'm actually going to point you not to Libertis Institute, but there's a group called the State Policy Network.
And the website is spn.org.
And they've got a map there where you can click on your state and you can find the organizations working at a state level in your community to try and affect change.
And so it'd be great for people all over the country to figure out who these groups are and support them, donate to them, get involved with them.
So spn.org is where you can find groups like Libertis working in your state wherever you are.
And you organize that platform now?
You're a member of that organization.
Oh, a member.
All right.
I want to thank you very much for coming and we'll stay in touch.
Also, I want to thank our viewers for tuning in today.
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