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Leviathan (noun):

1. sea monster defeated by Yahweh in the Bible
2. a political state, especially a totalitarian state, having a vast bureaucracy

“We are at a singular moment in American history,” writes Ned Ryun, producer of the new documentary American Leviathan, “where President @realdonaldtrump, who has the moral and political courage necessary, can unmake the unConstitutional State and restore representative government to this country and end the rule of the bureaucrat.”

Ryun is the founder and CEO of American Majority, a non-partisan political training institute whose mission, according to his website, “is to identify and mold the next wave of liberty-minded candidates, grassroots activists and community leaders.” The frequent Fox News commentator also writes a monthly column for The American Spectator, contributes opinion pieces for American Greatness, and is the author of several books, including American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism, upon which his new documentary is based.

Ryun calls the unflinching 62-minute film a wake-up call, “a guided tour through over a century of betrayal, through the rise of the administrative state and its relentless assault on the Republic.” Like Rome, our administrative state wasn’t built in a day; it was “methodically, intentionally designed to seize power away from the people and place it into the hands of unelected bureaucrats who now operate as an unaccountable ruling class.”

Steve Cortes, former advisor to President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, perhaps sums things up the best when he tells Ryun,

The practices, the politics, and the culture of Washington, D.C. are all antithetical to a healthy, functioning American republic. That’s just the reality. This city that is named after perhaps the greatest American ever, George Washington himself, this city does not in any sense function any longer as the agency and protector of the American people. Instead, it is the abuser of the American people.

The documentary lays out how Progressive Statists built this bureaucratic monstrosity and how they have used it to consolidate power. It features footage ranging from the Congressional hearing revelations of journalists like Michael Shellenberger to the propaganda of Left-wing media personalities like Rachel Maddow, but the bulk of American Leviathan is given over to Ryun’s interviews with senators, congressmen, historians, policy strategists, and other D.C. insiders, as well as his own commentary.

The film addresses:

• The roots of the administrative state and its ties to the Progressive movement of the early 20th century;
• How unelected bureaucrats became the real power brokers in Washington, D.C.;
• The role of FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and decades of bipartisan complicity in growing the Leviathan;
• The modern-day weaponization of government against dissenters and political opponents;
• A battle plan for slaying the Leviathan and restoring self-governance.

Divided into a number of acts or chapters with titles like “Two Governments” and “The Progressive Coup Against Our Government,” American Leviathan establishes a critical contrast between the Founding Fathers’ optimistic wariness of human nature, versus the Progressives’ utopian vision in the perfectibility of man, steered by a supposedly enlightened managerial class wielding all power with a sort of divine right, without accountability to the “unwashed masses.”

Along the way, Ryun blasts “the Four Horsemen of the Progressive Apocalypse” (with particular condemnation for Woodrow Wilson), and lays out the development of the progressive juggernaut that was and is, as Ryun puts it, “the polar opposite of what our Founders envisioned.”

Ned Ryun is a well-spoken host and narrator, and the speakers presented in the documentary are all articulate and insightful about the history of the American republic and the contemporary workings of the federal halls of money and power. For anyone who is fuzzy on the historic throughline linking the Hegelian origins of Progressive philosophy to the establishment and growth of a bloated bureaucracy whose purpose is not to serve the American people but to feed itself perpetually, Ryun and the film’s speakers make it not only crystal-clear but compelling.

Ryun urges viewers of the documentary not only to watch but to share it with likeminded friends and family and – above all – take political action. After all, as he notes, The Swamp thrives on silence and submission, and its greatest fear is that enough Americans will wake up and reject it.

Donald Trump – a political outsider when he announced his presidential candidacy the first time around – posed a serious threat to the administrative state when he went into the White House vowing to “Drain The Swamp.” The Deep State was too deeply entrenched to let Trump do that during his first term, but now an older, wiser Trump is in office again – this time with an unorthodox team of fellow political outsiders like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel, determined to take a wrecking ball to the status quo.

“I’m telling you,” Congressman Chip Roy says about Trump back in the Oval Office, “this town is now as nervous as it’s ever been.”

Good – now is the time to dismantle this many-tentacled beast, this “stifling menace of an all-powerful state,” as Ryun says, once and for all.

Watch it for free HERE, and check out this interview with Ned Ryun at The Right Take with Mark Tapson podcast HERE.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior