Latest / Claymore: Become Who You Are / #406 Lieutenant Colonel Matt Crouch, USMC, Now With Heritage Action: The Strategic Attack on Our Culture and Our Children

Transcript

#406 Lieutenant Colonel Matt Crouch, USMC, Now With Heritage Action: The Strategic Attack on Our Culture and Our Children · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:09
  Speaker 2: I'm so grateful and excited to be with Lieutenant Colonel Matt Crouch.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Matt's a recently retired Marine Aviator.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: Retours to Iraq and Afghanistan.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: He held several positions of command and staff.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: He's a graduate of the Naval Academy, the University of Maryland and the Hong Kong University Fudan International Management Business Administration Program.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: He's an Olmsted scholar, former non-resident senior military fellow to the Atlantic Council joint staff strategist and the current state director for Missouri, Arkansas and Illinois with Heritage Action for America.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Matt's married to Jenny Marie Crouch and together they have five children.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Matt Crouch, thank you so much, sir.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Appreciate you being with me.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Jack, it's my pleasure.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for having me on.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: We're going to talk a little bit about something that was on my mind and you were kind enough to say you would do it.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: I present what's called stolen innocent and it's about really the national sex ed standards here in Illinois.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: We're in the belly of the beast here, as you know how to preserve childhood innocence.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: You know I mean it's amazing things going on.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: But before we dig into that, you cover so much at Heritage Action and you're part of Heritage Foundation.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: Can you give us a little background on that and give us a little bit of?
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Tell us a little bit about your work and what you're doing, because, as grassroots organizations are around the country, we really love the plug into all your knowledge and information and we have a lot of listeners that are trying to figure out what to do in this crazy environment.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: So thank you again for being on.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: Tell us a little bit about what you're doing, what you're on, and then we'll dig into a few things.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, great.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much again, jack, you asked about Heritage Action for America and our relationship to the Heritage Foundation.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: That's a question I get all the time as I'm going throughout the state of Illinois talking to grassroots the Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: You can really think of us as a team of two Heritage Foundation many people are familiar with them, that Washington DC think tank developing great ideas in hopes that those ideas could become policy.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: And then you have Heritage Action, the part of the organization that I work in.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: We are out working with grassroots and working with state legislatures and we do this at the federal level as well to try and make those ideas into a reality, a policy reality.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: So if they're the brains, we're the brawn and we do that work to try and realize conservative goals in actual governance.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: And what's important to understand is both of these two halves are really truly dedicated to an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity and civil society can continue to flourish.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: It's an organization that's focused on ensuring that the America that we've inherited is still there for our children.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: We have seven specific areas that we prioritize and I think we're going to get into a couple of these in a little more depth.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: But those are first, to empower parents to make education choices.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: To secure America's borders and reduce crime.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: To ensure free and fair elections.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: To reverse the growth of regulations, spending and inflation, counter the threat of the Communist Chinese.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: We'd like to hold a big tech accountable to the American people and we want to protect unborn life and family formation.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: I think you can see that direct link between the challenges of protecting our children's innocence and protecting unborn life and family formation, and increasingly it also calls for us to do that empowerment of parents to make education choices for their kids, because it's really a place now in schools where family formation and the ideas behind that, the ideas that you and I share, are constantly under threat, and so Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action are dedicated to harnessing the grassroots movement to try and fight the fight against the left and its onslaught of our culture.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: Yes, thank you so much for that and that's a lot to chew on, but we actually work.
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: I'm with different groups that work on all of those issues in one degree or another.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: It's amazing just election integrity, even at the local level, let alone at the federal and the national levels, right, or the state levels.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: It's amazing things that we're fighting against right now and the corruption goes all the way down to these local.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: Look at school.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: You got to be careful with school board elections nowadays.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: It's amazing, matt.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: Another thing that you said is are the parents?
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: Somehow along the way, we've abdicated our responsibility as the primary educators of our children.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: We've totally given that up to the experts, and then we found out that the foxes in the henhouse, the experts, have turned on us.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: You know, maybe let's shed a little light on that, because I think when I'm out speaking to parents and really what I'm trying to do is wake them up to the point of what's actually going on in their schools, they're astounded sometimes by the pornography that we're showing.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: They're astounded by the SEL, the social-emotional learning, the books and the subjects that in the way they approach this, it's a total breakdown, I think, of morality, and it's not by accident?
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: Is it Everything that you mentioned there?
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: And all those things from the border, the regulations, the attack on the unborn life, all of this?
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: I'm going to just make this statement, matt.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: You don't have to agree with anything, of course, and I'm not going to put words in your mouth.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: But this is good versus evil.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: I mean, at the end of the day, if I want to put Somehow, you've got to put this in a framework, and I'm Catholic, and Catholic social teaching says there's three necessary societies, and if you think about a triangle, it almost looks like a pyramid, and at the base of that, those two corners, one is marriage and the family and one is morality.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: It's God, it's basically living out those Ten Commandments, and our founding fathers use those Judeo-Christian principles to build on, and then we always had this solid marriage and the family, and that school system and the stolen innocence is really dragging both of those, taking them down.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: So then our culture gets twisted and distorted and then, of course, that runs up the ladder, doesn't it?
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: To politics and to finance and our economic system.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Well, jack, I think you said a lot there and there are a few things that really stand out.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: First, I want to say it is the case that for many years, parents were having their trust violated.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: If you're in your 50s or 40s or even 30s and you have children you're sending to public school, your paradigm prior to COVID was based off your experience in school and you were confronted with certain material and presented with certain lectures and taught in a certain way, and you, as a parent, you just assume that that's continuing on, and for many years that was probably true.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: But somewhere in the last three decades all of that started to change.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: And it changed because there had been an infiltration of first of the universities and then the education colleges, and then ultimately in the K through 12 system of modern neo-Marxist thinking into the curriculum and they really, through a variety of Trojan horses, brought in something you mentioned social, emotional learning.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: That's just the latest marketing term for what we broadly call critical race theory and whether they call it diversity, equity, inclusion or action, civics or by some other benign euphemism.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: What they're really talking about is a hardcore Marxist ideology that's designed to break us down into a variety of groups, divided between the oppressors and the oppressed, and it's become pervasive and what it's really doing is corrupting the way our children are brought up, and it's doing that in a variety of ways, one of which is this threat of radical transgender ideology, which we can delve into a little bit with a little more depth here as we go forward.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I think it's.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Parents, through COVID, saw that they're trusted and violated, and it's critically important that we get out there and communicate with each other and explain that if you're not taking charge of your children's education and you're not in a school system that allows you some choice and some opportunity to ensure that your values are the values that are being taught to your children, then we are going to lose the country over the course of the next generation of students.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: And that's been done deliberately.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: The political left understands that capturing the minds of the youth is the way to capture the future, and they've gone about trying to do that in our public school system and the results are obvious If you look at the last round of the National Assessment for Education scores, it's just been devastating.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Covid was devastating, but the trend line before that just shows continued failure by our public schools.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: And so Heritage Foundation thinks that empowering parents to make those educational choices and having the broadest school choice available is one step in reversing that trend, and it really relies on putting parents, who are the best decision makers for their own children, in charge of that education of the children and letting them pick the values that they're going to be taught.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: And I think you're seeing that movement really take fire across the country.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: It's important that the conservatives, wherever they are in Illinois or California, do what they can in their local area to protect their kids from this leftist ideology and take their kids out of the system where that ends up being warranted.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: Dr John Lennon.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: Yes, well, let me pivot on you just a little bit then, because this is a frequent question, especially in Illinois.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: Because if you want that thumb of that oppressor or oppressor, if you want that thumb of power being pushed down, you just have to hang out here in Illinois, right Between Governor Pritzker and our Illinois Secretary of State, alexi Genulius, who drafted the state's first in the nation ban against book bans, when we tried to take the pornography out of libraries so that this wouldn't be exposed to children.
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: Dr John Lennon, maybe you saw this clip with our Secretary of State Governor, or Senator John Kennedy had him in on a video clip.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: I just saw this late last night talking about the pornography in our libraries, in our local libraries and also in our high school libraries and in our elementary school libraries, actual pornography which I show many, many times as I go out and speak.
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: But people don't believe me sometimes, and so I took that clip and I'm going to try to figure out a way to put that up on our website because it's such a powerful clip.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: But Senator Kennedy read from one of those books out loud, actually two of those books All Boys Are Blue and Gender Queer, and it was disgusting, dr John Lennon, and he's asking the Secretary of the state here in Illinois who's in charge of the library system, I guess why, and he could not answer it again, right?
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: So you see this push on us, right?
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: So here's my setup to this question is people will say, what can I do?
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: Because we don't have really school choice per se.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: We have an element of it here, but it's hardly worth talking about.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: I don't think, because I think they're trying to put a gabbash on that too.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: But true school choice where our tax dollars will follow us.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: Is there any chance with that, matt?
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: Because most of the people I talk to are hardworking, middle class and really struggle to find the money to pay their full real estate taxes and support the public school education and then send their kids to another school.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: And the other side of that is, if we all that are conservatives, if everybody takes their kids out and does find a way, if there was a way, we still can't leave all those kids in that public school Because at the end of the day, we still those are our neighbors and those kids will end up being, you know, their minds twisted and distorted in various ways and they're going to be voters someday.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Two things.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: One first don't give up hope.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: It's cliche, perhaps, to say that the darkest hour is just before dawn, but I think that's true, and it may very well be the case that as we go through this battle, it gets harder before it gets better, but I'm telling people, it's definitely worth it, Our kids are worth it, the future is worth it, this country is definitely worth it.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: So how do we roll up our sleeves and what can we do to take action?
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: I think that California and Illinois are not dissimilar in many, many respects.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: And I think we can look to some of the things that are actually happening in California right now.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: We're on a local level, at a place like Chino Hills or Murrieta or Temecula.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: There have been school board elections where conservative candidates have won and they have directly attacked the issue of transgender ideology and its radical nature and the way that it's being incorporated and taught in schools, the way that it's being applied to.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: You know, the breakup of girls' sports by allowing boys to compete, by the usage of bathrooms, crossing those sex or gender lines.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: They've instituted policies as a board saying that you can't do those things and the response, of course, came rapidly.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: The state of California is suing the school board in Chino Hills for their effort to force schools to report to parents that children are undergoing a gender transition at school.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: Right, something so basic as parents should know what their child is doing is under assault from the state of California.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: But it's in California that that fight is happening.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: So if you're in a place like Illinois, I would say get together as a group of concerned citizens, organize, take action at the local level, right, and begin to change your community in the way that you need that change, starting with your school board or your library board right, and it may not happen right away.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: There was this situation that you may be familiar with in this last series of elections up in Lincolnwood, where they had a lot of back and forth and a lot of fighting over the library board there and it didn't go as well as conservatives would like.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: But we have to begin staking out our positions and have those fights and expose some of the just egregious abusive materials that our children are being exposed to by folks like the American Library Association.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so those are the things I would say.
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: And, as you know, emily Dubinsky, I think her name is at the American Library Association and I think, matt, maybe you're up on this.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: I'm a claim Marxist, lesbian right, yeah, well, and she wants to queer the catalog system.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: Right and querying again.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: Our listeners are used to some of those terms so I can use them a little bit more rapid fire than some, probably.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: But really it's just turning what's normal on its head.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: I mean, in essence, anything that's normal from marriage in the family to our morals, to what's really what's true, good and beautiful.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: And let's take what's true, good and beautiful in the world and let's just flip it on its head.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: And so I believe that Illinois now has come to the point where I believe they've given more power to the ALA here in Illinois and I know states like Montana are separating from them.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: For those reasons, matt, you know, address that a little bit, because I think I've said this for a long time.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: But I think people need to hear it from you and others too and say, yeah, jack's not crazy that this evil, this neo-Marxist evil, which is an atheist power grab, putting a presser a press.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: You know the economic, the old economic model even didn't even work in the old days.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: You know Marx and Ingalls were after marriage in the family, right, and they always two God out that foundational triangle I was talking about.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: They knew they had to attack that.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: And this is what you're seeing.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: You know, with this I mean it's really again, these are my words.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: I'm a religious guy.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: You know it's diabolical and it's really attacking marriage and a family and we see the mental illness in our kids from this.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: I think that's finally what might start waking people up parents, up man, is that these kids are coming home and they're really struggling.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: But speak to it a little bit.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: I mean that they can push this down through our systems like this.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: And it's been going on for so long that we are really immersed in this, in this malue of this battle, aren't we?
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely so.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: We talked a little bit earlier about this idea of critical race theory, and it may be simpler to just refer to it as woke ideology.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Perhaps much of the audience understands that term and certainly the terms.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: They change so much it can be hard to keep up.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: But at the base of all of this, understand that there's a foundational lie, and that foundational lie is that there is no transcendent objective truth.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: And so everything else that stems from these ideas, whether you call it wokeism or critical race theory or social emotional learning, everything else is further predicated on lies, and it's fundamentally anti-human and it's fundamentally anti-Christian because it denies the sanctity of the individual and commoditizes them to put them into a group of, as I said earlier, either oppressor or oppressed, and that's all done with the end goal of seizing power.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: And the whole ideology, instead of being founded on a belief in truth, is founded on a belief that power is the only thing that determines the outcomes and places us all in a hierarchy, as I said, of oppressor and oppressed.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: And what's the result of that?
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: Well, it denies us all of hope, it denies us all of agency, and this is incredibly devastating when you look at it through the lens of what is it doing to our children?
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: right.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: When we think about childhood development, we understand that kids need consistency, they need security, they need stability and radical transgender ideology one of the forms of this neo-Marxist thought is being crammed down our throats through diversity, equity and inclusion training and, under the guise of tolerance, all that does is confuse our kids, right?
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: And what's the result?
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: That you mentioned this idea of mental health.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: Well, if you've taken away a childhood hope and told them everything in life is determined by some oppressor that's gonna exercise power over you and you've now been turned into a victim.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: You no longer have any ability to affect your condition.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: So anytime something's going wrong, all that you have left is an inward turn into depression, and you're seeing that manifest across our youth as these mental health concerns grow and we see increasingly a problem with suicide.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: Right, you know that there's a 2000% increase in the United Kingdom in just over the last seven years of what they label as gender confusion, right, and that 5% of Americans under 30 have identified themselves as non-binary right, meaning that they're not a girl interested in a guy and not a guy interested in a girl.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: These numbers are not explainable by any other means other than a social contagion, and you don't get a social contagion without a deliberately abusive indoctrination process, which is exactly what we're seeing in the media and public school systems as it applies to this radical trans-generated ideology.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: So certainly, if we want our kids to be hopeless and helpless, we should just continue to do what we're doing right, and I think the reality is that's not what we want.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: That's not what we want for our kids, and that makes it more and more important for folks to get engaged and take control of what their kids are being exposed to, with a particular eye on what's going on in the school.
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: So I would encourage parents to be very diligent with engaging with their children's teachers.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: I would encourage them to attend school board meetings so that they can be aware of what's going on in their school district and what kind of curriculum is being used out there.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: And if they're not satisfied with it, again thank you.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: Get organized as a group of parents and see how you can become part of the process of influencing that, whether it's running for school board or some other form of Administrative position inside your local school district.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: Getting back to that, that point about school choice, matt, here in Illinois or any state what are you seeing around the country?
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: Because I know people are really working on that and they're doing their.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: Many states are well ahead of Illinois Is.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: Is that model?
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: Or are you familiar with some areas where that model is working, where they've actually are taking those tax dollars and following and and and?
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: Is that possible, matt?
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: You know Illinois, with our pension problems and all this debt that we're in right now Are?
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: Would they let us in?
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: Look at these guys are just tyrants right now.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, all right.
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: Well, do you think they in?
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: And?
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: And?
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: We don't.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: And that's not even talking about these teachers unions that are so powerful.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: Right, nobody wants to let go of the control, so this won't be an easy fight.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: It's not gonna be easy, jack, and, as I'm sure many of your Illinois listeners know, what limited school choice and scholarship opportunity that Did exist in Illinois recently took a significant hit From the state legislature's failure to extend in the program this last session.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: And this is, of course, on on top of actions that you're seeing that are directly contrary to what we hope for our children in terms of Efforts by the state level government to ensure that Gender affirming care, which is a terrible misnomer.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: Right, because it's really just the mutilation of of children through the use of puberty blockers across sex hormones and ultimately surgery.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: But in Illinois there was an effort to make it a haven as states like Missouri pass Laws like to save adolescents from Experimentation act this last session.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: To your question about Education and can it happen?
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: Can education change happen in Illinois?
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: I do think it's.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: It's a hard slog and it's something that You're you're gonna have to start and go step by step In demanding change.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: And again, right, that requires parents to to get involved and Motivated and take steps, and I don't want to provide false hope into a very difficult environment like Illinois.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: But again, right, the kids are worth it, the country is certainly worth it.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: I would argue that the state of Illinois is worth it and you know, giving up just ensures that you won't get the outcome that you need.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: You asked about where we've seen success on the school choice front.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: There is a nationwide Effort that's gaining increasing momentum.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: You've seen great laws for universal school choice in Arizona, in Florida, in Iowa, in Arkansas, where they're gonna do a three-year phase in.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: So the movement is out there.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: It's growing and increasingly where their school choice.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: You are not seeing the problems that the doomsday Advocates are foreseen.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: You do not see the breakdown of the public school or the collapse of rural schools.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: What you see is choice spreading, people getting to put their kids in an academic program that suits that individual child's need and allows the parents to take charge of the, the rearing of that child, the education with their, their values in mind.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: So there are there are a lot of good examples out there.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: That is A lot of good examples out there that people can take a look at, and I think there's no better time than today to start that advocacy In a state like Illinois, and I would encourage parents that have the ability to to seriously consider Whether or not homeschooling is an option for them.
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: I know that Illinois is a state that has some solid protections for homeschooling and I think it's an option that parents can choose right now and is.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: We are a family that elected to homeschool for many years and we were in the military and we're able to do that in a variety of Locations.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: So I do think that for someone looking for an option today that has serious five.
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you so much for that.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: So, so we have a little bit of hope, huh, because it, because you know, I mean, you know it's just the situations like this, we see this every day.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: I mean, what we're talking about here is is a is a process that we need to just keep Um, waking people up.
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: I see so many young people met, um, you know millennials, and you know a lot of this is our fault.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: My fault is is is a boomer who sent my kids away to college, had no idea Uh, you had mentioned earlier this started the university level had no idea what I was sending them to this quagmire, this battle zone, and I really didn't arm them with the protection that they needed.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: You know, I mean you know, and really sit down with them when they start to come home and say, hey, dad, you know, uh, you know the, the, the, the, the, the bibles, this patriarchy system.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: They're trying to oppress women and blah, blah, and and you know, I didn't, I wasn't equipped to speak to those things, matt.
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: So I think that these conversations are so good to have, and what you're doing at the heritage foundation is just so good from an educational standpoint.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: Um, so we're gonna, you know you're gonna ask people again to, to reach out and and because you don't want to do this alone, I don't think right.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: And and resources you provide so many resources.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: I was looking at some of the things that uh from um, these seven, uh policy priorities, and we, we don't want to get into all them, but it shows the problem because, even though these are good in, in other words, one One of them says this and power parents to make educational choices.
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: So six to four, six over four, suburban women believe parents should have a role in deciding what is taught in public schools.
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: Now, now that's a win, six to four, but I'm surprised it's not higher, right?
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: And so here's the problem, right, is that?
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: I bet you, the younger moms I couldn't tell you, you know, definitely, but the younger moms are, you know, more and more of them are just abdicating this responsibility and not seeing it.
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: Now some of them are waking up.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: You know there's no doubt about it and and I work with homeschool groups, we support homeschool groups.
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: I go in and speak to that, to their, to their parents and kids about you know a lot of these sexual issues and and trying to lay down a foundation, but still there's not, there's not enough.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: I you know so many of these young people are socialists and it's our fault and and um, as they wake up, as they start to wake up, what would you recommend from?
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: With the heritage foundation, you know, what do you have and what other places can these people go a mat to start educating themselves?
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: Because one of the things We'd like to do here is to say look at and look at you.
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: You're the expert on this, really, and I look to you the heritage foundation and heritage action for a lot of things when I'm looking around on a website looking for resources.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: So so can you unpack some of that?
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: As we're looking around for resources, we want to connect with people.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: I know you do a lot of that work.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely so.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: I think the first thing I tell people to do if they're trying to get educated, come visit us at heritage action dot com.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: If you go to heritage action dot com, you'll be greeted with a variety of resources that both help to educate you on the issues but additionally Show you how you can take action in your community for the issue that you're passionate about.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: And then, if you're looking to get deeper and you want to go To heritage dot org, you'll get access to the Heritage Foundation's vast library of information that covers all the topics that the Heritage Foundation is developing conservative policy for.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: So that's everything from the war in Ukraine to the radical transgender ideology and school choice topics that we've been discussing today.
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: So those are two excellent resources.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: For folks that want to talk to me directly, I am happy to discuss these issues with them or any of their community groups, and I can be reached at matthewcrouch at heritageactioncom.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: That's m-a-t-t-h-e-w dot c-r-o-u-c-h at heritageactioncom.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: So shoot me an email, be happy to discuss your area of conservative passion and how I can help you advance the ball in your community across the entirety of our seven priorities and even other issues where we have conservative alignment.
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you for that, and can you shoot me an email with those contacts or any?
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: I have your contact, of course, but anything else you might want to include in the show notes, absolutely Thank you for that.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: We've got great resources that are one to five pages explanations of some of these difficult issues like critical race theory and the penetration of Marxist thought into our educational system and what needs to be done about it.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: Well, here's the thing I'm going to.
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and here's the thing.
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for that.
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: You know you're going to be coming out to visit our area on the this month.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: We're going to have you out to just a group we put together just to talk about these issues and you're going to come out and speak.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: So I'd like to, you know, throw that out to people too.
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: You know, if you can get a community group and just contact me, we'll make it, we'll market it and make it grow a little bit.
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: We can have Matt come out and speak on some of these issues and I know you're a busy guy, you're covering a lot of territory, so we don't want to have you come out for five people, matt.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: But if we can get a group together, people that are interested in these things, talking about school choice, talking about what's going on with it, with the you know radical transgender ideologies in the school, how we stand up against this, you know we need, we need guys like you and people out there, matt, just to give us some courage, because because you know, when you stand up against the Woke mob I'll wind up with this because I'm cognizant of your time.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: We were out speaking and I'm going to ask your advice here and you just, you know I'm not trying, I don't want you to have to say anything, that you know that you're going to get attacked on, but we're getting attacked all the time, right?
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: So I made a local library and it holds.
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: It holds about 100 people or so.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: We had standing room only presentation called stolen innocence, and what we're talking about is to parents and grand parents about the pornography, the literal pornography, in their schools and in the library.
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: Right Now we're in the library talking about it, but we're being, look at, we're just, we're just stating the facts, we're showing the facts, we're showing the books and we get a letter.
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: How would you handle this, matt?
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: We get a letter, which I just got, this letter saying that you know the other dates that you had booked.
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: You're not welcome back because we had a.
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: Somebody complained that you were, that that you know you're not open to everybody's and everybody's ideas.
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: And I and I said I said back to the to a person that was working at the library I said, look at, we're here with concerned parents and grandparents to talk about porn being shown to their kids and grandkids.
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: I mean, what are you talking about?
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: Why do I need to come up and conform to, to, to some other kind of standards?
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: Look at, you know the state doesn't own our kids and and so this is a hard thing to wake people up, you know.
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: You know the state does not own our kids.
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: The schools don't own your kids, matt.
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: We have to stand up against this stuff.
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: So but anyways, you know I start ranting or raving because it just makes me so upset, but it's a good.
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: It's a good point that how quickly that this, this ideology, will come after you try to censure, you, try to cancel you.
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: What would you do if you were, you were me?
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: How would you respond to that library?
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: Well, first I would say, Jack, I'm not a lawyer and I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express.
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: And either of my Matt.
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: So yes, yes, so we'll get that out of the way.
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: Clearly this is a violation of your First Amendment rights and yes.
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: I would.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: I would absolutely use whatever process the library has in place to get informed on what the complaint was, what the nature of the complaint was, and I would use their process against them to appeal to have your right to meet and use that public property for its design purpose, for your group.
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: And if you can't get satisfaction through the library, continue to elevate that through the system.
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: And if that doesn't bring you satisfaction, I truly believe the community has got to get together and address the leadership of the library in whatever appropriate political means are provided in your library district, and that, as I've said right might include having to conduct some campaigns to get yourselves on the library board, because you're not asking for anything that's untoward or inappropriate.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: All you're asking for is that people understand what kind of abusive materials are out there in the schools and in the libraries and how that's affecting the health of our children and the health of our country over the long term.
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: It's important that we, as conservatives, stand up for what is right and understand that if you're standing up fighting against the woke mob and the mafia that's trying to cancel us and convert our culture into something that it was never intended to be Right, you're standing up for truth, because at the base, as I said, of all of this is a lie.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: It's a lie about who we are, how we're related to our creator and what our God given rights are, and so there's nothing more important than having the fight for these things at the local level, because it's only through recapturing the American dream at the local level that we're going to preserve the nation and the Constitution.
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: Matt, that was awesome.
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, and that's great advice, and thank you, and I need to hear that for myself, just so I'm not crazy.
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: So I don't think I'm crazy.
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: Go out with this, will you, matt and I'm taking you a little bit over time Go out with what you said before, because I want people to hear this statement again.
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: You talked about the foundational lie, right?
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: I mean, when it gets down to the basics, I think that's worth repeating.
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: Whether you just repeat it in your own words again, but you made this statement and I don't want people to miss this the foundational lie that there's basically no objective standards of truth.
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: And look, I'm going to just say it again, because this is anti-human.
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: You said right, this is attacking the human person.
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: So can you go out with that statement again, because I think people need to, if nothing else, take this statement that Matt made earlier in the show and just type it out, put it someplace on your computer or whatever and pray on that, you know.
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: As I said, all of the challenges that we're facing in the broader cultural war that stem from the advocacy and implementation of this neo Marxist thought, these woke ideologies.
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: They are anti-human and they are anti-Christian.
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: They deny the sanctity of the individual because they deny the existence of an objective tree, and the left loves this because it has a broad appeal across all of their pet issues, because it justifies every self-serving thing that they are doing.
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: It justifies abortion and promiscuity and hedonism and, of course, radical transgender ideology.
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: It robs individuals of agency, makes them into victims and Robbs them of a hope for a change in their condition, which, I would argue in our country, even with the challenges we have today, is something that is well within the power of the individual to do, because we are still a free and fair country and we will remain so if Folks like you and I, jack, and others who are like-minded, are willing to take up the cause of the country and fight hard for our values and our principles and never quit, and even in the face of the woke mob in fact I should say especially in the face of the woke mob and Understand that courage begets courage and that the fight that you're having when it's over the school board, when you're trying to root out that pornographic material from the school library, or whether it's for a free and fair election.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: That's a fight, not just on that issue, but it's a fight for that fundamental belief that we were fearfully made by a great creator who is the way, the truth in life.
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: I, I personally believe that 100%, and so I would just encourage people to do what they can to be an advocate for truth in their community and, if they need help with that, to reach out to me If they're looking for resources to go to heritageorg, or especially heritage action calm, and with that I'd just like to say again Thanks so much, jack.
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: It's been a real pleasure to talk to you.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: The country's worth fighting for and we should be hopeful because there are a lot of us out there that truly believe that the Constitution was inspired document and that there's a brighter day for America had that we just keep leaning into this difficulty.
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: Roll up our sleeves and get to work.
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: Wow, lieutenant Colonel Matt Crouch.
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: Thank you, sir, that was beautiful.
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: I mean I you know I got goose bumps up my spine.
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: What a great way to end it.
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for that.
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: Really appreciate it.
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: Thank you for your courage.
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: Thank you for a heritage foundation and heritage action.
• 43:50
  Speaker 2: We really appreciate it.
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: I look forward to seeing you later this month, man.
• 43:53
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much and thank you to all our listeners and supporters.
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: Don't forget to get this podcast out, share it with your friends and families, stay courageous and we'll talk to you again soon.
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: Goodbye, everyone.
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: You.