Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles in studio to discuss a new conservative movement called Founders Federalism.
Leahy: Andy Ogles is in studio with us. Andy, I just love to say broadcasting live from our studios on Music Row in Nashville, Tennessee. It is the dream of many talk radio hosts to be able to say that.
Ogles: Absolutely. You know, of course, pre-COVID Nashville was the IT City. Booming in every which way since obviously, Mayor Cooper has shut down the city countless jobs lost. Millions upon millions of dollars lost and unnecessarily so. But yes, absolutely. It’s a privilege to be here. I love the studio. I love to be in person. I mean goodness to be able to say hi Michael and not being through some screen or device. Man, I hate Zoom meetings. I’m zoomed out. I’m WebExed out. I’m tired of it. And again just to be in-person to say hey buddy how are you doing?
Leahy: I’m with you. Zoom. Let’s just say no more Zoom. I hate it. I hate it. And now we do the phone interviews of course. It is a little more difficult to have the kind of back and forth and dialogue in a phone interview that you can have in person. And it’s just a lot more fun. You can see the person’s attitude, their point of view, and it’s normal. It’s more like a conversation.
Ogles: Well, you know being in person and being in studio, I’ve got notes with me and it totally reveals that I’m a big nerd. Because I’ve got this stack of papers. I don’t know what you’re going to ask me and so I’ve got all this data in front of me just in case right because I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re going to talk about. But again, we’ve got to get back to normal the data’s clear. We’ve known since June that we could open the economy.
We’ve known since June that kids should be in-person in school. The learning loss that our children have suffered is really unforgivable. They lost the last half of last year which I get right the last year’s school year. March and April we were all terrified. But come June come July all the data out of South Korea and Germany and France was pointing the same direction. There was no reason why we went virtual at the beginning of this year. The data hasn’t changed.
Leahy: Zip, zero, nada. No reason for it.
Ogles: No. Not at all. Again, I’m not saying the virus isn’t real and I’m not saying it’s not serious. If you have a comorbidity, if you’re in that high-risk category, it’s incredibly serious. But it does have and you know, the data proves it out a 99 percent survival rate period. I mean, you’ve got 3rd graders now who are almost a year behind going into the fourth-grader here behind you don’t get that back.
Leahy: You never get that back. It’s developmental time.
Ogles: You never get back emotionally, it’s delayed everything and it is rainbows and unicorns. And to think to tell parents to tell the public that you’re going to somehow be able to make that up is lying to you.
Leahy: Rainbows and unicorns. I like that. I want to run something by you, Andy. We’ve been friends for a long time and we both think about the constitutional conservative populist movement, and I want to run something by you just to see if you look at the world in a similar way. So as you know, and you were involved in many of the early Tea Party rallies, the Tea Party was the first wave of what I call the constitutional conservative populist movement that began in 2009.
It had many grassroots leaders around the country. And it was united around three core principles: fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited governments, and free markets. That morphed into the Make America Great Again movement. And that had one leader, Donald Trump. And it added to the core values of the Tea Party Movement free and fair markets and American sovereignty. What it gave short shrift to was fiscal responsibility.
Then what happened when there was a rally of 300,000 in Washington D.C. on the day when Congress met in a joint session to count the Electoral College slates from the various states. 300,000 people rallied on the mall. Later that day at the Capitol building about a mile or so or a mile and a half away. Now, it doesn’t really matter for this discussion how that came about. I think that the Capitol police did not handle their duties properly.
The Capitol police report to Senate Minority Leader now. The then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. There are a lot of questions about what they knew the police were doing and what they weren’t doing at that time. But that aside it is a true fact that about a thousand people entered the Capitol at that time. And that the majority of them were probably Trump supporters in one form or another.
There was Antifa and Black Lives Matter. That was a turning point in American history I think. it was a turning point in the constitutional conservative populist movement because what happened in my view is the MAGA movement lost the moral high ground when that happened. And so you look at it and say well is that the end of the constitutional conservative populist movement? And my answer is no.
I think we need to move to a third phase. Let me describe what I call that. I call it Founders Federalism the Founders Federalism movement in that I think the power now should be in the states. We have about 35 states where freedom is still possible. And those states, the state legislatures, and governors have historically over decades, perhaps the last century has allowed the national federal government to usurp their powers.
And it is time for leaders in those states, Tennessee, of course being one of those 35 in the state legislature at the gubernatorial level. It is time for those groups to aggressively retake the powers that have for decades been usurped by the national federal government. And to do so very aggressively in a legal manner. What’s your take on that?
Ogles: I mean, I agree. When I watch the the events unfold on that day I was heartbroken. We as a people we the people we have a right to peacefully assemble, to have our voices heard. But the operative word there is a peaceful assembly. Or words. We even had down in Maury County we had a small BLM demonstration protest whatever you want to call it, but it was peaceful.
And I greeted them. It was a hot day and went out there with a case of water and I apologized because it wasn’t cold water but it was water no less. And I said, I defend your right to be here and we have some historic monuments on the grounds of the courthouse there. And I said look I’ll stand here with you defend your right to be here. But the moment that that monument gets defaced or the moment that that trashcan gets flipped over you would be breaking the law and it’s game over.
So the same thing applies to whether your BLM or a Trump supporter we don’t have the right to break the law and to your point in doing so we forfeited some of that moral high ground. But I don’t think the cause is lost. I think it was a wake-up call that we have to be careful not to get caught up in some of the rhetoric and make sure we’re coming from a constitutional perspective and a legal perspective. I’m a big nerd, a self-proclaimed nerd.
I love our founding fathers. I love their vision for this country. I defend California’s right to be liberal. The Constitution gives them that right. We however in Tennessee and Oklahoma and Texas we have the right to be conservative and we must stand together and defend that right. And that’s why I love DeSantis down in Florida. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his policies, but he’s leading the charge and saying enough is enough. Greg Abbott in Texas and Kristi Noem in South Dakota. They’re standing up as governors and saying get out of our backyard. We don’t want you here Washington D.C.
Leahy: You’ve mentioned three governors that are right at the forefront of what I think the country needs to be doing right now. And frankly, I think they’re starting the process. I hope that governors around the country will become even more aggressive in taking back those powers and authorities that have been usurped at every level by the national federal government in Congress by the deep state by the bureaucrats. The unelected bureaucrats who passed these regulations and promulgated them without public input necessarily and then try to force it down upon people around the country.
I’ll give you an example. This executive order came out of the Biden administration on transgender policy. I see them using the money that the national federal government gives ten percent of the funding for K-12 education. Tell me if you see this coming. I see them pushing all sorts of transgender policies down into K-12 public schools in Tennessee. Do you see that coming?
Ogles: Oh, absolutely. I don’t know if it was The Federalist or Breitbart but one of those conservative websites had an article is that was called the transgenderfication of public education. and it was because of this very thing. and so basically you have the federal government extorts money from states like Tennessee and then they siphon it through the Capitol and they send it back to us our money.
It’s taxpayer money. And they say hey if you want this back, you’ve got to do X, Y, and Z which is he she it. And again, we as a conservative state we don’t have to accept that. And yes, there’s going to be some blowback and yes, the cancel culture is going to be up in arms, but who cares! This is a conservative state. We are a Christian state and we should stand our ground.
Listen to the full second hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Andy Ogles” by Andy Ogles.
