The decision by U.S. Senator Dick Durbin not to seek re-election has led to a generational opportunity in Illinois with ten Democrats and another half dozen Republicans seeking their parties’ nominations in the March primaries. Kevin Ryan is a former teacher and United States marine and is part of this crowded field.
He grew up in Orland Park- in the south suburbs of Chicago. Ryan attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to become a teacher, and after graduation went to work in the Chicago Public Schools. During this time he also he served as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps deploying to Afghanistan.
When he got back in 2020, he left his teaching job and earned a graduate degree in diplomacy at the University of Oxford and another degree in national security from Georgetown University in Washington. Ryan continued his military service and also worked in the Treasury Department in the Biden Administration. Now he’s running for Senate and spoke to the 21st show’s Brian Mackey.
Interview Highlights
On being deployed to Afghanistan
“It was a very interesting experience, because it was the tail end of the war. We were more of an occupying force than anything else. And most interestingly, we were there while the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, entered into the truce, of the ceasefire with the Taliban, which didn’t include the Afghan government. And what was really interesting from my perspective on the ground was, you know, there was this ceasefire. However, the Taliban stopped attacking us, but they just took off the Taliban hats and put on ISIS hats, and ISIS started attacking us.”
On affordability crisis
“The source of every issue is money in politics, because corporations have this outsized control over our policy. We have existing monopoly law. Why isn’t it enforced? Why aren’t we strengthening it? It’s because corporations are able to use their tremendous wealth to protect their profits so they can get even more wealth. So talk about affordability and price gouging at corporate grocery store chains, they’re using that wealth to circumvent our laws to basically gouge consumers. So that’s one way it all comes back to money in politics.”
On border control
“We can’t just have people crossing the border without any kind of process to know who’s coming and leaving the country. So we need to have an enforceable border and I’m very critical of the Biden administration for not enforcing the border as well as they should have. And so now we have this problem where we have an influx of migrants in the country, and now what do we do with them? I support enforcing the border and doing a hard reset, just granting amnesty to those people who’ve demonstrated that they’ve been living, working, paying taxes, building our economy, those people who’ve been living in this country and doing all those things they deserve amnesty and a pathway to citizenship. Then we need to enforce the border and have …streamline our processes for people to come into this country legally.”
On Gaza
“And the Netanyahu administration has clearly demonstrated that they do not want Palestinians returning to Gaza, that they had no problem leveling major cities in Gaza, and it’s because they’re trying to ethnically cleanse the area so that they can take it over and not have to worry about Hamas or all the problems that were stemming out of Gaza. They just want that problem to go away, and the best way to make it go away is to ethnically cleanse and get that part of the population out. What should the United States do about that? I think the United States needs to stop all military aid and funding to Israel until the current regime is held accountable for its crimes against humanity. We cannot return to that funding or support until a new administration is elected that recognizes the state of Palestine and invests in good faith in rebuilding Gaza.”