“The first fight I ever got into was when someone told me I was voting for Stevenson,” says Ray Myers, a highly engaged conservative activist. “‘I like Ike!’ I responded – and the fight was on!”
Myers was six years old at the time – and while he’s (hopefully) not beating people up on playgrounds anymore, his passion for politics has only grown since those days. “My greatest interest has always been current events – which I picked up through my days in public school and college.”
Myers is well known in activist circles for his reliably conservative perspective and aggressive enthusiasm for the cause. “I’ve always been kind of a trailblazer on my own path,” Myers says. “When we moved to Forney in 1970, [my wife] Sonia and I started the first Republican precinct convention ever held in the Forney area.”
From there, he hit the ground running, and has remained highly active ever since. In between the time he spent working as a teacher, coach, and eventually as a principal, Ray spent much of the ‘70s and ‘80s working on different Republican campaigns, including for Nixon, Reagan/Bush, and Phil Gramm.
“The pivotal political moment came when Obama came on the scene,” says Myers, like so many of the conservative movement’s best activists. “I knew immediately that America was in trouble, and that is when I started the Kaufman County Tea Party.”
It was then that Ray saw the light – that not all Republicans are equal. “I saw our Republican colleagues acting like Democrats and immediately realized that these so-called Republicans were not conservatives at all – but were basically Democrat plants.”
“I have been screaming about this issue ever since,” he says.
But it’s about so much more than that for people like Ray. “I believe strongly in conservative values and I’ve raised my kids in the church and know that less government control is best,” Myers says. “I was a history major in college—but I never valued the history of our nation and Texas like I do now. It becomes so much more meaningful when you feel your country slipping away from the traditional values with which it was founded.”
“I will fight to the end for a traditional conservative America,” Myers says. “I feel that God has given us a short reprieve and he is looking to us to provide the action necessary to right the ship.”
Ray lives in Forney with his wife Sonia, who, like Ray, spent almost 30 years as a public school teacher. They have two adult children, Patrick and Michael, both of whom graduated from SMU.
“We as conservative activists must continue to recruit and vet righteous candidates to run for office,” says Myers. “I feel that we who have been in the fight have a calling to be candidate mentors. We are as good as any consultant that I know, and as I do programs across the state I make sure to ask the participants to ‘take care of your piece of Texas!’ If we will all do that, we can take care of Texas!”
