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Unknown A
Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm your host, Jessica Tarlov. Today we have Congressman Pat Ryan, the Hudson Valley native representing the 18th district of New York. His main focus in Congress is providing relief for Hudson Valley families, improving transportation for folks in his district, and investing in the United States Military Academy, where he hopes to provide for the next generation of military leaders. The congressman recently made headlines for calling Elon Musk a villain on cnn, which I loved, and for discussing believes young men can benefit from the Democratic Party. Super excited to have you here. I want to get to the meta stuff, but start with a news of the day topic. Everyone is talking about Elon Musk and Doge and the quote, unquote, forensic audit they're doing of the government. You made, as I already referenced, a comment about him being a villain. Can you talk a little bit about what you think is going on with the Trump administration and also what you're hearing from your constituents as we're just a few weeks into Trump 2.0.
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Unknown B
Yeah. And I think it's really important to center the American people and my constituents and what they're hearing and feeling, which is an unprecedented, we've got an unprecedented level of calls, emails, texts. Honestly, friends, I haven't talked to like a decade or texting me like, dude, what is going on? What, what can we do? And, and people are rightly deeply concerned about an unprecedented encroachment on our privacy on at least one, if not multiple amendments in the Bill of Rights. And I think that it calls for appropriate aggressive action. And I've tried to give all the new administration the benefit of the doubt, but it's very clear to me, Elon Musk is a villain. And we have to talk in our, the moment we're in, we have to have heroes and villains and our story as Democrats. And Musk has now certainly earned that title.
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Unknown B
And we should hold him accountable not only for getting all up in everybody's private data at treasury and these other agencies, but also I'm going to start shining a light through my role in the Armed Services Committee in the potential, if not certain corruption around all his defense contracts, where he stands to personally make incredible billions of dollars with access to privileged access to information and connections based on how much money his companies have already been paid before he was in this position. Forget about now. So we're, I think we're at a moment right now more broadly, maybe talk about this more later, where we have to be in just constant communication with, in my case, 800,000 constituents with the American people And without judgment and certainly without any condescension, just describing what the real harmful impacts of this is and will be. The harmful impacts of the funding freeze, whether that's head starts in my district that still don't have funding to feed and care for kids, or 20 veteran inpatient beds at my local VA that I go to in the Hudson Valley of New York State that had to close because of
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Unknown B
Trump's hiring freeze on personnel. Like, this is hurting people deeply, and we have to get back on our front foot and start talking about the impacts of these decisions. Even if you voted for President Trump, you should at least know and be an informed citizen about what the impacts are.
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Unknown A
Well, that seems like the important lane that Democrats can go down, which is to make this about Elon Musk and what's happening writ large in the administration without going after Donald Trump, who is still enjoying a 53% approval rating. You know, we tried just making it all about Trump for years, and it didn't really get us very far, certainly in the last election. So how do you think that Democrats can effectively do this? I know Jared golden, who represents also a swing district, voted for Trump. He's a Democrat, though, has said, you know, this is all about Musk for me. You know, you can't sit up there just railing about Trump. How are you going to be approaching it?
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Unknown B
Well, I think we should certainly start with the most egregious violator of our Constitution, which is Elon Musk. Everything he's doing, and increasingly things he stands for and says are just directly contrary to the oath that I took as an army officer, the oath I've taken as a member of Congress, the oath that all my colleagues, by the way, have taken, regardless of party, and the oath that even the president himself took. And Elon didn't take that oath. He is an unelected, unaccountable guy who, as I think you said recently, wasn't even an American until not that long ago.
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Unknown A
And so we love immigrants, but.
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Unknown B
Well, these are just facts. I mean, we just have to share the facts. And I think not getting in a place of I told you so or condescension or judgment. We just have to inform people. And my goal is to speak less myself and more, highlight the voices of my constituents, whether that's veterans in my district that now don't have a place to go if they're at a crisis of a drug overdose, for example, or parents who don't know where to drop off their fidryl because their head start might close or farmers who just learned that a bunch of USDA payments are still frozen and all screwed up. So we need to elevate those voices of the American people, center the American people as the heroes and make clear that Musk is the villain and there are others, too. But. But he's certainly number one.
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Unknown A
Yeah, definitely seems like the head of the bunch. Specifically, I want to talk about your service and also how that plays a role in how you lead and represent your constituents. Your West Point grad, Army vet. There was a great splashy feature in gq, which I saw even before your press person sent to me. Loved the photography. You talked a lot about your military background, how it gave you this sense of belonging, letting you know that your life mattered, and also what patriotism means to you. Could you expound on that for our listeners and also talk a bit about how you think the Democratic Party can get back to being the party that embraces people like you and gets them excited about what we have to offer?
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Unknown B
Yeah, this is, this is my. If I do one thing in however many years, I'm fortunate to have this job goal, which is to stop the direction where in our country, where having an American flag at your home or loving our country is somehow belongs to one party. We need two functioning, healthy parties at least. We need three branches of government that have checks and balances. These are all the things that our founding fathers and mothers talked about and wrote about in the Federalist Papers and so on. And I think we're at a moment in the country where we, we do need, as leaders, not just in politics, but all leaders need to remind people and sort of go back to our patriotic, founding, revolutionary roots where we had a monarch with all power and control, unaccountable and unelected, taking our money for their own gain.
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Unknown B
And you know, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. I think we're at a moment where we need patriots without partisanship attached to rise up here again and reassert that. And my goal is from within the Democratic Party largely, although I have my disagreements with the party to. To build that coalition out from there. Because if you look at the last eight years, the Democrats are the Patriotic Party. We stood for our Constitution and against an insurrection. We stood to keep our government open multiple times in my first two years in Congress when the Republicans wanted to shut it down. And so we have to make that proactive case. And I think so much of the frustration I have with the Democratic Party is right now. We've left a vacuum for our opponents to define Us in many cases not grounded in reality or focusing on sort of the loudest voices that represent the far extreme.
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Unknown B
And we need to make sure we're proactively putting out this patriotic vision, really, of where we think the country can and should go.
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Unknown A
How do you think we can do that?
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Unknown B
Well, I think sort of this idea that as we're in or maybe approaching crisis or maximum division, there actually is opportunity there. I hate to say that, but I think that I've generally been that kind of person in my life where even if you're in a bad situation, you try to make the best of it and use a crisis to bring people together. So I think focusing on core issues and areas where there's broad resonance and appeal and without a doubt that is affordability in the economy right now. It's the only thing we should be talking about as Democrats. And we failed to do it, at least nationally in these last elections. Myself and other House members that talked obsessively about affordability and listened also more importantly to our constituents about their pain on affordability, we way outperformed the national brand because we just actually listened to voters and did everything we could to fight for them and against any power, whether corporate or government, that was sort of harming them from an affordability perspective.
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Unknown B
So we should see, for example, this coming potential shutdown or government funding moment that's coming in the next few weeks, I think as an opportunity to assert a proactive view of what Democrats want to do in lowering housing costs, lowering prescription drug costs, lowering food and grocery costs, and put that out as our marker that if you don't work with us on that, on these specific proposals, then you're obstructing the number one need of the American people.
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Unknown A
Should I take you as a no on the idea of being open to shutting down the government from the Democratic side? Because that's something that's being floated. Senators Booker, Andy Kim are saying that there are open to a shutdown if it means being able to hold Musk and co accountable. Where are you on that?
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Unknown B
I think we're talking about, with respect, you're talking about sort of inside baseball process rather than really talking about like what are we for, like we should put out a policy focus, not like we're trying to shut things down or stop things because a lot of agree or not a lot of what Trump is doing separate from some of these overreaches is very popular, as you said in some of the polling numbers. So we should listen to our voters and focus on what he's not doing, which is anything at all in three weeks time to lower costs in any way. In fact, much of what he's done is driving up costs, the threats and imposition of tariffs, seeing food prices go up, seeing costs of everything go up. We should talk about a proactive agenda that we want the Republicans to support in this budget negotiation about lowering housing, healthcare and food costs.
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Unknown B
And if they don't do that, then that's their choice. They're in the majority. If they can't summon their majority, that that's their decision to shut down the government. But I think we should start from a place of good faith. Let's focus on the number one issue in the country, which is affordability.
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Unknown A
Making it Mike Johnson's problem as opposed to making it our problem, is definitely the right way to go about it.
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Unknown B
Just quickly, like I think is, the messaging here, to your point, is super important. I learned this day one in the army, when in charge, take charge. They're in charge of everything. We, the American people chose that they know. The American people know that we need to help remind them of that. And we should put out our proactive agenda of what we stand for. Let the those in charge respond to that and either get on board with it or not.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Also let them go on the record if they want to make cuts to Social Security, to Medicare, to Medicaid. Let it be known. So much of what's going on right now, at least it feels to me, is in this dark vacuum where people have no idea like what you're talking about in your district that had started as an open, that you can't go to the va they're messaging right now that nothing has actually happened. Right. That the freeze was unfrozen and there are no problems and the court system is struggling to keep up with the breakneck pace of what happened.
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Unknown B
Well, and I think understandably this is me not being a lawyer. Most Americans once it's like in the courts and all that, it's like, all right, that's very complicated and long and slow. Need to be messaging in the moment at a local visceral level. These are the specific impacts, whether economic especially, but certainly to key things like child care and veteran services that are real and visceral and tangible and do it in a nonpartisan way. We've rallied in my district, a bipartisan group of veterans, VFWs, legions, elected officials of both parties who have said this is like not who we are as a country where we leave our veterans hanging and we're going to stand against this. And that's powerful in terms of coalition building at a moment like this, 100%.
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Unknown A
It would be nice to be able to go, no labels. Right. If you could just be common sense and then see how the chips fall, we'd probably do a lot better electorally as an extension of what you're talking about. I'm curious what you think about rallying excitement for the Democratic Party because we don't get to campaign without labels and we're particularly suffering with young voters. In the latest CBS poll, Trump has a plus 10 advantage with gen Z voters, which if you told me in 2016 that that was even fathomable, I would have said, you know, I have millions of bridges to sell you. How can we address that problem? And specifically targeting young men, and this.
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Unknown B
Is some of what that article you mentioned was sort of focused on is what, what happened with young people. And especially I don't think any person or group likes to be sort of talked to in such a political way of like, here's my plan to win back men or here's my plan to win back women. Like, I think that's disingenuous and comes up people's BS meter is very high. And that just rings the bell like, this is just a politician trying to sell me. Sell me a bridge or whatever. And so I think we need to be much more authentic and real. I think what I talked about in the article is sort of like, there is this conversation about toughness and masculinity happening where if the brand of the Democratic Party is there's. To me, there's two aspects to sort of leadership. One is care and one is fight.
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Unknown B
It's like I have to. I have to fight for my people, but I have to do it from a place of caring about them. That's good leadership to me, whether in the army, business, family politics. The Democratic Party, I think is very heavy on the care, which is great, but hasn't shown the fight very much. Right. Trump and MAGA are big on the fight, less so on the care. And the sweet spot is both, and doing it authentically. I think if we do that certainly with policy, but more so at a values and culture level, we. That's when our brand is strongest, when we are fighting for the underdog. We're fighting for you against a person like Musk, by the way. And we can get back to that. Absolutely. That's, you know, we've had fdr, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln. I mean, these are models of how to have that sort of what I'M calling patriotic populism.
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Unknown B
I know populism is like a word with a lot of current connotations, but we're in a populist moment in the country and Trump is destructive answers to that. We have to have constructive answers and policies to meet the populists. Rage to riff on your title here of your great podcast. Like, that's where we're at. And we gotta be. We gotta listen and hear voters on it.
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Unknown A
It's definitely what seems to be in vogue and most resonant with voters. I have a lot of friends. I'm more of a normie Democrat or establishment Democrat, I guess, but I have a lot of friends who like to kind of goad me with Bernie would have won. And I'm like, well, you know, he's out there on this or that. They said, but he's a populist fighter. And that is the mood right now.
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Unknown B
No, that is the mood certainly in my district, especially in any purple or competitive district. You talk to members of Congress, House members, which is where I just, you know, by virtue of room sitting, tend to have the most conversations within my party. Is like, regardless of what, like traditional caucus or group you belong to, progressive or moderate or blue dog. The common theme is an economic populist set of policies and rhetoric that is just grounded in actually listening to voters, understanding that, like in my community, for example, wages for 20 years have been flat and costs are just piling up on everybody. Neither party has actually solved that. And Trump was kind of the first one to actually channel that and get that and speak to that. And shame on us for not having a better, more constructive set of solutions and rhetoric around it to give a.
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Unknown B
A case that people can trust and believe around solving those problems.
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Unknown A
Absolutely. One of the core complaints that I hear is about Democratic leadership. At this particular moment, we seem flat footed. We don't have a unified message. We have these weird rallies with Chuck Schumer screaming we will win after we just lost and, you know, Al Green's cane blocking the shot. What do you think leadership can do? You know, I'm certainly not asking you to go against anyone. And I think that Hakeem Jeffries does a great job in the House. But where do you think leadership can improve? Let's say, in making sure that the topics that you're discussing are what are in the forefront versus the sideshow stuff when people go to the polls.
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Unknown B
Well, by the way, I'm not saying I'm certainly right here. I'm just at a moment where I think we have to be willing to take risk and, you know, kind of say what we're hearing and then we see where it goes. What I think the moment we're at as a party is, I actually think, exciting. Where I'm a big believer in, yes, you have formal official titles, but leadership to me is not about that. Good leadership is about by power of example or by power of taking action and seeing people respond to it. You can set direction for any organization or group. And there's a lot of folks in the Democratic Party right now tend to be relatively younger, although that's a low bar, and newer, and many of whom were mobilized by Trump's election in the first term, by the way, myself included, to come into politics who I think have a different theory of change and are willing to be out there and kind of pushing.
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Unknown B
And I think that's healthy at a moment like we're in and we just. Sometimes leadership is creating formal leaders, creating the space for that innovation and nudging and pushing is what's needed. And I think we're going to start to see that bear out here in a way that's actually will ultimately, in the medium and long term, be healthy for the party, especially as you look ahead to 2028 and a presidential primary where we'll really choose who's our next national leader. But in the meantime, I don't, I don't mind letting House members and local elected officials and senators see what's working, connecting. And it really requires us to go back to listen to voters and not just talk to Dems, but talk to everybody and see what helps rebuild this sort of patriotic coalition. And I think from that, we're going to come through this okay, as long as we just bring intensity to that process.
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Unknown A
Are you seeing in particular with voters in your constituency who have jobs like teachers, police, fighter, police officers, I should say police fighters, veterans, that they are shifting towards being less partisan? Because that's a trend that I'm noticing.
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Unknown B
Yeah. I mean, especially in New York specifically. I'm a data person. If you look at young voter registration in New York, my district is one of the highest of this actually in the state and in the country, young voters are registering, which is great, but they're increasingly registering unaffiliated. In New York, that just means you, you're, you don't choose either party. We don't have like an independent label. You just, you're just registered but unaffiliated. That's a growing, growing. That's now the second biggest group in New York. Democrats, number one, unaffiliated, number two, Republicans are third. And that that's mirrored across a lot of the countries. So I think, for a lot of good reason, trust in both parties is at historic lows and figuring out how to speak to those voters in a way that's still grounded in values, but doesn't come with the typical, like, partisan purity tests and framing.
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Unknown B
And you're either fully on this agenda or not. Like, that's not how anybody lives their life. In the real world, we focus on the area where we have common cause. You build a coalition around it that's clearly affordability in the economy, and that's the space we're going to have as each day Trump fails to do anything to fix the number one problem of the American people. Folks are smart. They will see that and feel that. And he's talking in about invading Gaza and sending American troops instead of bringing down egg and food costs and bringing down rents and housing costs, bringing down prescription drug costs and healthcare costs. So that's the one. Even in early polling, that's the one place that the American people are already seeing and feeling like, huh, he said he was gonna do this. Instead, he's doing a lot of other stuff, some of which I might agree with, but that's not my core problem that I elected you to focus on.
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Unknown A
I want to make sure that we talk about your national service bill. How is the process going on that something? Scott Galloway, who I host this with, loves this, and is talking about how we would be way better off if we did have a national service component for every American. So please tell us.
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Unknown B
Yeah, very quickly. I think that the case which we should make every chance we get is that my life was changed by military service in exposing me to a bunch of people I wouldn't have otherwise met, forcing me to work together with them towards a common mission, and showing me that the greatest reward and joy in life is accomplishing something for a cause greater than yourself, with a group of people. And I think that's a big part of the answer, by the way, to the problem that young people are feeling, to our prior conversation, where they want to be part of something, but they. They don't see those options right now. So one of my big legislative priorities is a national service push, which has been really hard, sadly, to get moving through Congress, even though it's such a bipartisan idea that everybody you talk to is like, oh, that sounds great, but when it comes time to fund it, generally Republicans, unfortunately don't want to put up the money like, for example, if we doubled the slots in some of our existing national service programs, where you have more qualified applicants than you have
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Unknown B
slots, that would double the number of people in the country doing service. The cost is very, very low compared to many other things we invest in. And the return on that is just transformational. And you think about, like, the GI Bill of my grandfather's World War II generation. So legislatively, it's way harder than it should be. And so I'm going to devote a bunch of energy to trying to build not only Democratic support, but Republican support. And there is a group in Congress that gives me some hope called the Four Country Caucus, which is a bipartisan group of military veterans. There's about 40 of us now. Actually, it might even be more than that now. I grew with some new members of both parties this time, and there is a consensus there that this is something we really need to prioritize through this caucus. So I think that's a logical place to build some support and try to grow it.
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Unknown B
But maybe I'll come back to when we can sort of say, okay, if I only had a few more people on this. I think we get over the line and see if we can rally more folks.
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Unknown A
I love that. I didn't know about the Four Country Caucus. That's very cool. So we're trying something new here at Raging Moderates. This is going to be the formal last question, and you are the inaugural flight on this. So what's one issue that makes you want to rage and one issue you think we should all calm down about?
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Unknown B
I think, honestly, the issue that really makes me want to rage is you've got president again in Donald Trump, who has a documented record of calling our troops suckers and losers, who's insulted military families, Gold Star families, trampled on the honor of Arlington National Cemetery, all documented, not even really up for debate. And he ran largely on getting us out of wars, by the way, and since taking office, has talked about invading Canada, Mexico, Panama, and just the other day, double down on Gaza. And as someone who served and lost friends, and I still wear this memorial bracelet of all my West Point classmates that were lost in combat. That's bullshit. Like that is a disservice to our whole country and certainly to those who we lost. So that's the thing that makes me rage. I've been very public about that and tried to make that case in the 2024 election.
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Unknown B
Unfortunately, did not succeed. The thing I think we should be less outraged about is that the second half of this calm down.
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Unknown A
We're workshopping it. So if you think less ragey, I.
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Unknown B
Mean, this is maybe a slight variation on less ragey, but I'm getting a ton of calls in my office from constituents saying, what are you doing to stand up against Musk and Trump and the MAGA movement? Which I understand that, but I've not seen any of my Republican colleagues that are in charge get this question as they all watch and say nothing about all the things happening. Like, even there were some Democratic activists that were protesting Democratic elected officials rather than protesting Republicans. Like, I think that that just doesn't make sense to me. So that's less a calm down, more of a. At least if you have rage, channel it appropriately from an accountability perspective at the people who have the opportunity to fix the thing that you're concerned about.
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Unknown A
Yeah, I'm definitely a little bitter still about the people who didn't vote for Kamala saying, oh, what's going on in Israel and Gaza is still Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's fault somehow. But that's a topic for another podcast. Lots of feelings on that to have you back. Thank you so much, Congressman Ryan, for joining us. I hope that we'll stay in touch and I appreciate your time and your thoughts on everything that's going on in the early days of Trump's second term.
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Unknown B
Thank you for having me. Keep the faith. I'm still actually quite optimistic about our country.
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Unknown A
Love it.
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Unknown B
Thanks.
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Unknown A
Thank you.