Originally Published on DC New Line
Ned Ryun, founder and CEO of American Majority, said he set out last year to make a personal contribution to the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary — an effort that became his new documentary, The Thread of Liberty: Keeping Our Republic.
Ryun announced that he had posted the full film online and made it available at ThreadofLiberty.com.
“We have an incredible nation, the first ever rights-based government in the history of the world in which the people are sovereign,” Ryun wrote in a Jul 3 post on X. “We should appreciate it and, more importantly, love it.”
The documentary traces the American founding not as a sudden break from the past, but as the culmination of centuries of Western political thought, put into practice by men who understood human nature clearly.
Ryun framed one of the defining questions facing the country today as whether Americans still feel a sense of duty to the democratic experiment their forebears began — and he pointed to a renewed, instinctive patriotism as the starting point for answering it. He said he hopes the documentary contributes to that renewal, closing his announcement with a simple charge: “Keep America Free.”
The film draws on interviews with historians and scholars — including Victor Davis Hanson, Paul Rahe, and Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn — to build its case that the founding was as much a theological claim as a political one: that rights come from God and are merely secured, not granted, by government.
Ryun is the founder and CEO of American Majority, having trained more than 86,000 candidates and grassroots activists across all 50 states since its founding in 2008. He also spent time as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration and served on President Trump’s 1776 Commission. The son of Olympic medalist and former Kansas congressman Jim Ryun, he now lives in Purcellville, Virginia.