Unravelling the Pre-Trump, Anti-Interventionism of the US Right, with Ron Paul
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET: https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald
Become part of our Locals community: https://greenwald.locals.com/
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glenn.11.greenwald/
Follow System Update:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/systemupdate__/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@systemupdate__
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/systemupdate.tv/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/systemupdate/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, one of the most extraordinary political events in the U.S.
over the last several decades, undoubtedly, was the successful 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
It was remarkable for so many reasons.
Including the fact that it was the first campaign in either party to overcome and vanquish vehement opposition by the larger donors and funders and other establishment sectors that control both political parties in Washington.
For decades, the national press assumed, with good reason, that it was impossible for anyone to become the presidential nominee of either party with at least the acquiescence, if not the full-scale support, of the party's establishment forces.
That is why they all assume that, just like George Bush in 2000 and John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012, Jeb Bush would easily march toward the Republican nomination in 2016.
Remember that?
Jeb Bush?
That Trump thumped aside one Jeb establishment replacement after the next and easily marched to the nomination rewrote the rules of Republican politics.
The Nikki Haley campaign represents one last desperate effort on the part of the American establishment to retake the Republican Party out of the hands of the Republican voting base, which supports Trump, and return it to the hands of the bankers, neocons, and military-industrial complex that feels entitled to control that party just as they control the Democratic Party.
But the other striking feature of Trump's successful Republican primary campaign was that he ran not to champion GOP orthodoxies, but to heap scorn on them and to bury them.
From neoconservative warmongering to Wall Street-centered policies of free trade and deindustrialization, Trump brailed against what had been long-time gospel beliefs of the Republican establishment.
And the more he did that, the more the GOP establishment hated him, but the more popular he became among actual Republican Party voters.
But Trump's ideological heresy did not emerge out of nowhere.
He did not just invent these anti-establishment beliefs overnight.
The opposite is true.
Anger toward warmongering neoconservatism and economic policy that benefited the GOP's globalist, corporatist donor base at the expense of the working class had been brewing in right-wing politics for a long time.
Both Pat Buchanan's 1992 primary challenge to incumbent GOP President George H.W.
Bush far more successful than anyone anticipated, and Ross Perot's independent run in 1992 gave voice to and exploited these sentiments and exposed how potent they were.
But it was really the presidential campaigns of Ron Paul in both 2008 and 2012 that brought these new perspectives and this anti-establishment anger to the fore.
When he announced that he would run for president, Paul was considered a joke, a fringe backbencher in Congress who, precisely because of his out-of-step views, especially in the War on Terror era dominated by 9-11, the Iraq War, and the neocons of the Bush-Cheney administration, pundits assumed would attract little-to-no support.
They barely paid attention to it.
But as usual, they were very wrong.
In both 2008 and especially 2012, Ron Paul went into the deepest red districts of Iowa, North New Hampshire, and South Carolina with a message that the pundit class assumed would be anathema to conservative and evangelical voters and yet resonated with them instead.
He railed against the Iraq War, the War on Terror, and the general policy of using war as a first resort in U.S.
foreign policy.
He mocked Republican Party tough guys who glorified war while ensuring that they never themselves fought in those wars, unlike Ron Paul who answered the draft call to fight in Vietnam.
He documented the weaponization of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and federal police powers to erode core civil liberties.
And he convinced voters that longtime foreign and economic policies of the Republican Party were enriching a tiny elite while immiserating ordinary Americans.
He railed against the evils of the drug war, calling it racist, as well as the policies that put more Americans in prison than any other country.
In general, he proved that there was a gigantic breach between the views of the Republican elite and the big corporate donors that controlled the party on the one hand, and the party's voting base filled increasingly with working class voters who came to understand that the party they had been voting for had been waging war on their interests and on their lives, creating the anti-establishment conditions for Donald Trump's promise to be the voice of the forgotten man.
We will review the history of the GOP anti-establishment politics that preceded and gave rise to Trump and the vital role that Ron Paul played in it.
And then we'll speak to Congressman Paul himself about the trends in Republican Party politics now, the two wars that Joe Biden is now funding with American resources and with bipartisan support, namely the wars of Israel and Ukraine, the rising distrust of the CIA and the U.S.
security state, The way in which American debt continues to grow due to these bipartisan D.C.
policies, his view of the proper relationship between the U.S.
and China, and much, much more.
We have always regarded Ron Paul as one of the most principled, honest, and interesting voices in U.S.
political life.
And the emergence of Trump and the transformation of Republican politics leaves little doubt that he is now one of the pivotal figures of the 21st century in American politics.
Before we get to all that, a couple of programming notes.
First of all, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we take your questions and respond to your feedback and critiques and hear your suggestion for future shows.
That after show is available exclusively for members of our Locals community, for subscribers.
And if you want to become a subscriber to our Locals community, which not only gives you access to those twice a week after shows, but also to the daily transcripts of each show that we publish of our program here, as well as the interactive weekly thread we have where I try and answer as many questions and critiques as possible.
It's where we'll publish our original journalism.
And it's really key to helping support the independent journalism that we do here so we don't have to rely too much on corporate advertisers.
You can just click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you there.
And as a special offer between now and Sunday, December 24th for the holidays, we're offering a 40% discount on an annual subscription to our Locals community for next year.
The link to that is in the description and you can also just click on that join button and if you use the holiday code holiday on checkout you will automatically get that 40% for your annual subscription Next year.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form, where we publish each episode in podcast version 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
And if you rate and review and follow the program on those platforms, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
As a reminder, because of the interview and the monologue that we're going to do before it, we won't have time tonight for our after show on Thursday, but we will be back at the beginning of this year once we take a break for the Christmas week, and we will have our regular after show every Tuesday and Thursday.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
I've talked about before the first time I had to write an article that really created a breach between myself and the large amount of left liberal readers that I had back then in 2009, 2010, which was when I had to...
Weigh in on the Citizens United ruling, and I supported the majority ruling in that case on the same free speech grounds that caused groups like the ACLU to weigh in in favor of the majority view, simply that these campaign finance reform limitations were too much of a restriction on free speech and the way in which people can speak about candidates.
The case that gave rise to it was an attempt by a NGO, a nonprofit group, to produce a critical film with Hillary Clinton right before the election.
They were told by these campaign finance laws that they were barred from doing so, a classic free speech case.
And that alienated a lot of my left liberal readers.
But the second time that I created a breach, a serious breach between my readers, was when I wrote an article when I was at Salon in 2008 or 2012 about the candidacy of Ron Paul.
And I was essentially asking why it was that given all of the policies Barack Obama was supporting, that the left claimed to find so anathema, defending Wall Street with the bailout, extending the war on terror policies of George Bush and Dick Cheney after he promised to uproot them, why it was that extending the war on terror policies of George Bush and Dick Cheney after he promised to uproot them, why it was that it was so clear to them that Barack Obama was the preferable choice to Ron Paul, even though Ron Paul was advocating
Things like anti-war policies, railing against the evils of neoconservatism, advocating that America's wars, including the drone war that President Obama had been launching, was contrary to U.S. interest.
He was a vehement opponent of the Patriot Act.
He was a vehement opponent of the Wall Street bailout.
He was against the CIA and FBI interference in our politics and abuse of power.
He was somebody who was questioning the drug war, in fact, advocating an end to the drug war on the grounds that we shouldn't be putting people in prison for using drugs that adults choose to put into their own body, something that the left had long supported as well.
And I always found Ron Paul to be such an interesting figure because he never followed partisan orthodoxy of any kind.
In fact, he spent his career in Congress challenging a lot of the core planks of Republican Party orthodoxy and he constantly got re-elected by his very conservative district in Texas that valued his independence so much.
Now I think it's really been forgotten What role Ron Paul played in ushering in a lot of the conditions in the Republican Party that permitted Donald Trump to emerge in 2016 as this anti-establishment candidate.
So we interviewed Ron Paul just shortly before the show on a wide range of issues, including the Iraq war, the Israel war rather, and the war in Ukraine, a lot of other things.
But before we get to that, I just want to walk through a little bit of the history of how crucial he was in transforming Republican politics, especially in the two presidential campaigns he launched in 2008 and 2012.
Now I want to begin with a presidential debate that took place in South Carolina in 2008, Remember, 2008 was the end of the second term of the Bush-Cheney administration.
The Iraq War was still ongoing.
9-11 and the War on Terror were still dominant, especially in Republican Party politics.
President Obama ran on the platform of closing Guantanamo, something he never did.
Guantanamo is still open to this very day.
Has a ton of detainees, dozens, who have never been convicted of a crime.
They've been there over 20 years.
That was the atmosphere, though, was in the Republican Party, there was no questioning of the Iraq War or the war on terror, except for Ron Paul.
And he was on a stage with people like Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, people who love to pretend they were tough guys, even though They evaded service in the military, they evaded the draft, whereas Ron Paul answered the call to the draft and fought in Vietnam, and they tried to call him a traitor and a weakling for questioning these war policies that were doing no good for the American people.
So here's a taste of what the debate stage in a South Carolina primary in 2008 was like when it came to Ron Paul.
Congressman Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq, who would bring the troops home as quickly as almost immediately, sir.
Are you out of step with your party?
Is your party out of step with the rest of the world?
If either of those is the case, why are you seeking its nomination?
Well, I think the party has lost its way because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a non-interventionist foreign policy.
Senator Robert Taft didn't want to be in NATO.
George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy.
No nation building.
No policing of the world.
Republicans were elected to end the Korean War.
The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War.
There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican Party.
It is the constitutional position.
It is the advice of the founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy.
Stay out of entangling alliances.
Be friends with countries.
Negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.
Just think of the tremendous improvement relationship with Vietnam.
We lost 60,000 men.
We came home in defeat.
Now we go over there and invest in Vietnam.
So there's a lot of merit to the advice of the founders in following the Constitution.
And my argument is that we shouldn't go to war so carelessly.
When we do, the wars don't end.
Congressman, you don't think that changed with the 9-11 attack, sir?
Thank you.
What changed?
The non-interventionist policies.
No, non-intervention was a major contributing factor.
Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us?
They attack us because we've been over there.
We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years.
We've been in the Middle East.
I think Reagan was right.
We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.
So, right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican.
We're building 14 permanent bases.
What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico?
We would be objecting.
We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us.
Are you suggesting we invited the 9-11 attack, sir?
I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it.
And they are delighted that we're over there because Osama Bin Laden has said, I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.
They've already now, since that time, have killed 3,400 of our men and I don't think it was necessary.
Now note there that what he's talking about When he said, we should think about why we got attacked on 9-11.
It isn't because of the lie that they hate us for our freedom.
He mentioned this letter and he was talking there about Osama Bin Laden's 2002 letter to Americans explaining the reason we hate your country, the reason we want to bring violence to you isn't because we hate your freedom.
It's because you've been interfering in our country, you've been bombing Iraq, you've been sanctioning Iraq, and you've been killing hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq, you've been placing troops on sacred Saudi soil, and you've been arming and supporting and funding the Israelis and their campaign against the Palestinians.
And Ron Paul was saying that one of the costs of going around the world, launching all these wars, and bombing all these other countries, and interfering in their politics, is they want to bring violence back to you.
Now at the time, it was taboo to say this in Republican Party politics.
As you just saw, this journalist, this TV journalist said, you sound like you're justifying the 9-11 attack.
And he said, I'm not justifying it.
I'm just explaining the causes.
And remember this recent controversy when a bunch of young Americans discovered this letter and they started on TikTok saying, wow, I never realized before that These were the reasons we got attacked on 9-11, because before 9-11, we were bombing their countries in the Middle East and interfering in the region.
And Western elites panicked so much over the discovery of this letter by young Americans that they demanded TikTok censor the letter, which TikTok did.
They censored all discussion of the Bin Laden letter, and The Guardian removed it from their site.
This was the person, Ron Paul, bringing these issues up well before any of that happened.
It's been taboo in the United States for so long.
Watch what happened after he said this.
May I make a comment on that?
That's really an extraordinary statement.
That is an extraordinary statement as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq.
I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.
And there are all the Republican lobbyists filled in the debate stage, cheering and screaming for Giuliani.
And remember, Giuliani is another person who never served in the military, but he tries to say, I lived through the 9-11 attack.
What does that mean?
I also lived through the 9-11 attack.
I lived in Manhattan just like Giuliani did on 9-11.
I was there.
I don't consider myself a combat veteran for having lived through the 9-11 attack.
But this was the climate that Ron Paul was facing when he ran for president in 2008.
And I would ask the Congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that.
Congressman?
I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback.
When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, yes, there was blowback.
The reaction to that was the taking of our hostages.
And that persists.
And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk.
If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.
They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free.
They come and they attack us because we're over there.
I mean, what would we think if other foreign countries were doing that to us?
Was the prevailing ethos of the Republican Party in 2008.
And it was no better in the Democratic Party either.
Now, despite all that, despite the complete lack of establishment support, despite the way in which he was scorned by Republican Party donors, you heard that sustained applause when Giuliani said, how dare you, sir?
Didn't even bother to address it.
Ron Paul did much better with the actual voters than he did with the Republican Party pundits, journalists, and donors.
Here, for example, from The Guardian, you see that he placed second in the Nevada primary.
Yet all these people on the stage who were supposedly so beloved in Republican Party politics, and yet Ron Paul, with that message, with that treatment, Place second.
Now, he had been repeatedly in Congress going and delivering messages that were attacking the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, the warmongering that was taking place in the name of the 9-11 attack, in all sorts of ways.
Listen to what he said in 2009 in the floor of the House of Representatives.
What's happening in the Middle East, in particular with Gaza right now, we have some moral responsibility for both sides.
2009 was yet another time when Israel was bombing Gaza and Ron Paul was speaking about our support for Israel as they did it.
In a way, because we provide help and funding for both Arab nations and Israel.
And so we definitely have a moral responsibility, and especially now today, the weapons being used to kill so many Palestinians are American weapons, and American funds essentially are being used for this.
But there's a political liability which I think is something that we fail to look at because too often there's so much blowback from our intervention in areas that we shouldn't be involved in.
You know, Hamas, if you look at the history, you'll find out that Hamas was encouraged and really started by Israel because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat.
You said, well, yeah, that was better then and served its purpose, but we didn't want Hamas to do this.
So then we as Americans say, well, we have such a good system, we're going to impose this on the world.
We're going to invade Iraq and teach people how to be Democrats.
We want free elections.
We encourage the Palestinians to have a free election.
They do, and they elect Hamas.
So we first, indirectly and directly through Israel, help establish Hamas.
Then we have election.
Then Hamas becomes dominant.
So we have to kill them.
You know, it just doesn't make sense.
During the 80s, we were allied with Osama Bin Laden.
And we're contending with the Soviets.
It was at that time our CAA thought it was good if we radicalized the Muslim world.
So we financed the Madrasa schools to radicalize the Muslims in order to compete with the Soviets.
There's too much blowback.
There's a lot of reasons why we should oppose this resolution.
It is not in the interest of the United States.
It's not in the interest of Israel either.
And you see there the resolution on the screen was a resolution.
Israel has a right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza.
In other words, a resolution that the United States has been passing year after year after year justifying the Israeli attack on Gaza.
And Ron Paul was there to say, why are we involved in everyone else's conflicts?
Why are we constantly sponsoring and applauding and financing the killing of people in other parts of the world?
Given how much this is endangering US interests.
Something that back then, nobody was saying.
Certainly not in the Republican Party, barely in the Democratic Party, other than Ron Paul.
Now just to give you an example of how...
Criticisms of U.S.
policy toward Israel have been around for a long time in certain parts of the U.S.
right, primarily voiced by Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, the leaders of this kind of anti-establishment wing of Republican politics.
Listen to what each of them... Pat Buchanan, remember, was a high-ranking member of the Nixon administration, and then the Ford administration, and then the Reagan administration.
And he became one of the leading voices opposing the U.S.
invasion of Iraq, just like Ron Paul was.
This was the faction of the Republican Party that proved to be absolutely right about U.S.
foreign policy and warmongering.
And listen to what they said over the years about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and especially the U.S.
obsession with devoting all of our resources to defending and financing Israel.
Republican Congressman Ron Paul recently called the onslaught in Gaza an atrocious massacre.
It's our money and our weapons.
But I think we encouraged it.
Certainly the president has said nothing to diminish it.
As a matter of fact, he justifies it on moral grounds.
They have a right to this without ever mentioning the tragedy of Gaza.
You know, the real problems are there.
To me, I look at it like a concentration camp and people are making homemade bombs and like they're the aggressors.
The Israelis have been hit with, for six months, with these little rockets, which didn't kill anybody.
It was outrageous, cruel, and stupid, and they triggered a blitzkrieg against the Palestinians in Gaza, which, in my judgment, is an Israeli concentration camp where a million and a half people are locked up.
out or go in.
They've been controlling food, electricity, fuel, and the innocent people in Gaza are the ones suffering.
A lot of people here, a concentration camp, doesn't that diminish the significance of the real concentration camps?
I'm not talking about a death camp.
I'm talking about what the British had in concentration camps in South Africa and what the Spanish had in Cuba and what others have had, where they bring all these people, lock them in there, and treat them with great cruelty and a humanitarian disaster despite what Zippy Livni says.
So in case you think that our view of the Israel-Gaza conflict is purely a left-wing view, here are two of the most populist, anti-interventionist, So in case you think that our view of the Israel-Gaza conflict is purely a left-wing view, here are two of the most populist, anti-interventionist, heterodox leaders of the Republican Party of the American right over the last 30 years, not heterodox leaders of the Republican Party of the American right over the last 30 years, not fringe figures, leading figures of the American right, calling what the Israelis are doing atrocious and vicious, causing concentration camps in Gaza
Now, although President Obama was elected on a platform to reverse the war on terror, he escalated many of those very policies and really escalated the idea of using drones, personless drones, to go and just drop bombs on a bunch of Muslim countries, personless drones, to go and just drop bombs on a bunch of Muslim countries, killing all sorts
And so many of the terrorists who came over to the United States, the so-called terrorists, who tried to kill innocent people, who tried to detonate bombs in places like Times Square, said they were doing it to avenge our use of drones against innocent Muslim civilians.
All the ones that killed those children and women at wedding parties and so many others.
And here, Politico reported in 2011, there you see the headline, Ron Paul slams Obama on drone strikes.
Quote, Ron Paul accused President Barack Obama on Thursday of offering suspected terrorists fewer legal protections than Nazi war criminals were given.
Criticizing not only the drones, but President Obama's continued use of due process free imprisonment for people that we accused of being terrorists or terrorist suspects but never actually gave them a trial for it.
Ron Paul was also one of the leading opponents of the effort by Hillary Clinton and the more warmongering wings of the Biden administration or the rather the Obama administration in 2011 and 12 to were advocating for intervention in Syria to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
Here he is on the House floor explaining why he thinks it would be a disaster and morally baseless for the United States to try and overthrow the government of Syria.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Plans, rumors, and war propaganda for attacking Syria and disposing Assad has been around for many months.
This past week, however, it was reported that the Pentagon indeed was finalizing plans to do just that.
In my opinion, all the evidence to justify this attack is bogus.
It is no more credible than the pretext given for the 2003 invasion of Iraq or for the 2011 attack on Libya.
The total waste of those wars should cause us to pause before this all-out effort at occupation and regime change is initiated against Syria.
There are no national security concerns that require such a foolish escalation of violence in the Middle East.
There should be no doubt that our security interests are best served by completely staying out of the internal strife now raging in Syria.
We are already too much involved in supporting the forces within Syria, anxious to overthrow their current government.
Without outside interference, the strife, now characterized as a civil war, would likely be non-existent.
And there's no way to deny Ron Paul was right.
That the U.S.
intervention in Iraq, and then in Libya, and then in Syria, produced zero benefit for American national security, And destroyed those countries in the process.
Just like our intervention in Ukraine has done.
Just like our assistance to Israel has done repeatedly in Gaza and continues to do.
Just like we do whenever we go around the world with these wars that have nothing to do with American national security or the lives of the American people.
Ron Paul ran in 2020-12 for president as well, was treated with as much scorn.
Only this time he came in a very robust third, barely behind two other candidates, including Mitt Romney, the eventual nominee in Iowa.
And then here you see from the New York Times, in 2012, he came in second place in New Hampshire and really started scaring the Republican establishment.
Who are all these people in the Republican Party voting for somebody with this message?
Ranting against American wars, the war in Iraq, neoconservatism.
The intervention in Libya, the intervention in Syria, it really showed these growing sentiments in the Republican Party who found Ron Paul's message so convincing.
Now, it wasn't only foreign policy, and obviously economic policy for which he was known, libertarian economics, but also All kinds of other policies as well that the Republican Party had long embraced, along with the Democratic Party, that he railed against.
Here from CBS News in February of 2012, on the campaign trail, Ron Paul decries the quote, war on drugs.
This is something Republican voters had never heard before.
And he went and convinced them that we were wasting enormous amounts of money imprisoning huge numbers of Americans for drug addiction, for what was a spiritual and health problem, and ultimately for punishing adults for putting into their body substances that they and ultimately for punishing adults for putting into their body substances that they And he explained in the interview, we're about to show you as well, that alcoholism is a far more devastating problem than drug addiction.
And of course, alcoholism is legal, even though half of our political class, if not more, succumbs to it.
Quote, if we are allowed to deal with our eternity and all that we believe in spiritually, and if we're allowed to read any book that we want under freedom of speech, why is it that we can't put into our body whatever we want?
Paul told more than 1,000 people at a rally in Vancouver, a suburb of Portland, Oregon.
Paul did not mention his rivals for the Republican nomination, but criticized President Barack Obama for killing American citizens, with suspected terrorist ties, and for expanding financial regulations.
Now, this shows you the extent to which he was really such an honest politician.
He could have curbed these More controversial views and yet refused to, and that was why he was attracting so many large rallies, even though he had no Republican backing, including of a lot of young people, preceding Bernie Sanders' attraction of a lot of young voters in 2016.
Here was one of my favorite moments of the 2012 Republican Party debate when he was on a stage with Newt Gingrich, who had been calling for every country to be bombed.
And they got into an argument over the fact that while Ron Paul, who everyone on that stage was calling a traitor and a coward for opposing wars, was one of the only ones on that stage who actually went and fought in an American war, while Newt Gingrich, the big, strong, tough guy, accusing everyone of being a traitor and a coward and an appeaser and Neville Chamberlain, ran in the other direction when called on to serve.
Watch this exchange.
Let's go to you, Speaker Gingrich.
Recently, Dr. Paul referred to you as a chicken hawk because you didn't serve, given what you just heard Governor Perry say about understanding the military and Dr. Paul's comments.
How do you respond?
Well, Dr. Paul makes a lot of comments.
Do you hear that?
Ron Paul said Newt Gingrich loves to send people to wars because he never fought in one.
World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
I grew up in a military family moving around the world.
Do you hear that?
Ron Paul said Luke Gingrich loves to send people to wars because he never fought in one.
And that's true of so many Republican politicians.
And his answer was, my daddy served in war.
Watch how this unfolds.
In 1979, I've spent 32 years working, starting with the Army's training and doctrine command.
I was the longest serving teacher in the senior military for 23 years.
I served in the defense policy board.
But let me say something about veterans.
Because as an Army brat whose family was deeply engaged, I feel for veterans.
We had a great meeting today in Wolfborough with veterans.
And I made a commitment in New Hampshire the hospital in Manchester, we would develop a new clinic in the north country using telecommunications and we would provide a system where veterans could go to their local doctor or their local hospital.
The idea that a veteran in the north country in midwinter has to go all the way to Boston is absolutely, totally, fundamentally wrong and it's not a good idea.
And I would say as an Army brat who watched his mother, his sisters, and his father for 27 years, I have a pretty good sense of what military families and veterans' families need.
Congressman Paul, would you say that again?
Would you use that phrase again?
Yeah, I think people who don't serve when they could and they get three or four or even five deferments, they have no right to send our kids off to war and not be even against the wars that we have.
I'm trying to stop the wars, but at least you know I went when they called me up.
But, you know, the veterans problem is a big one.
We have hundreds of thousands coming back from these wars that were undeclared, they were unnecessary, they haven't been won, they're unwinnable.
We have hundreds of thousands looking for care.
And we have an epidemic of suicide coming back.
And so many have, I mean, if you add up all the contractors and all the wars going on in Afghanistan, We've lost 8,500 Americans and severe injuries over 40,000 and these are undeclared war.
So Rick keeps saying you don't want this libertarian stuff, but what I'm talking about, I don't bring up the word, you do, but I talk about the Constitution.
The Constitution has rules and I don't like it when we send our kids off to fight these wars and when those individuals didn't go themselves and then come up and when they're asked they say, oh I don't I don't think one person could have made a difference.
I have a pet peeve that annoys me to a great deal because when I see these young men coming back, my heart weeps for them.
Well, Dr. Paul has a long history of saying things that are inaccurate and false.
The fact is I never asked for deferment.
I was married with a child.
It was never a question.
My father was in fact serving in Vietnam in the Mekong Delta at the time he's referring to.
I think I have a pretty good idea of what it's like as a family to worry about your father getting killed and I personally resent the kind of comments and aspersions he routinely makes without accurate information and then just slurs people with.
I need one quick follow-up.
When I was drafting, I was married and had two kids and I went.
I wasn't eligible for the draft.
I wasn't eligible for the draft.
God, that captures so much about American politics and captures so much about the psychology of why Americans love war from a safe distance.
We're going to do a show on this as soon as we come back from the Christmas break about the psychology of war.
You look at these videos of Israeli soldiers rounding up a bunch of Palestinians, having no idea if they're Hamas or not, stripping them to their underwear.
Or in the West Bank, stripping them to their underwear, putting them on the floor, blindfolding them while the Israelis take over their house.
And it's no mystery why a lot of men in the West who have never found purpose or strength, who have never been to war, who won't go to war, find a lot of pleasure in watching that, in cheering for it, in feeling a vicarious strength.
from seeing other people do it.
That is a big part of the psychology of how the West gets people to keep applauding wars from a safe distance, sending Ukrainians to their death, sending Israelis to their death, watching Gazans killed, as long as the Western populations never have to fight these wars themselves.
And that was the disgust that Ron Paul and so many people like him who actually did go fight these wars feel for these Republican politicians who, in their generation in Vietnam, ran in the other direction, got all these deferments like Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney and all these people on the stage with got all these deferments like Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney and Now, here is Ron Paul in 2014.
Let's listen to what he had to say here.
And right now we're trading a whole lot.
The West is trading a whole lot with Russia.
We should have.
This was right around the crisis with the U.S. in Crimea when Russia had taken over Crimea after the U.S.
engineered a regime change operation in Kiev.
I have listened to what Ron Paul said about that.
...emphasize that rather than us putting on sanctions.
So I'm opposed to virtually all sanctions unless there's a declared war.
I've argued that case for a long time.
So you would just leave Ukraine sort of sorted out between themselves and the Russians?
Whatever happens, happens.
Well, certainly United States...
I speak more from the perspective of the United States taxpayers.
And it doesn't serve our interests.
We've already spent $5 billion over the last 10 years trying to pick and choose the leadership of Ukraine.
And then we participated in the overthrow of the Yanukovych government.
And this is when this recent stuff really stirred up.
But we've been involved too much, and I take a non-interventionist foreign policy position.
It's not our business.
It doesn't serve anybody's interests.
It's part of the same thing that led us into the disaster in the Middle East.
A lot of people die, a lot of money is spent, and we're still suffering the consequences of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And there's a threat of the war in Syria.
We don't need another threat.
The American taxpayers don't want it.
I don't think there's been as consistent and credible of an anti-interventionist, anti-war voice than Ron Paul in politics before Donald Trump in the last 20 years.
And Trump was a much more charismatic figure, but Ron Paul really devoted his career to these principles and understood them in a very doctrinal way.
And the success that he had Really did cause the smarter people in Republican politics to start to see that the Republican Party and the Republican Party base was becoming increasingly inhospitable to the neoconservative agenda.
That was what the success of Ron Paul, among other things, represented.
And that was why there was this article in 2014 in the New York Times by a chronicler of neoconservatism, Jacob Heilbronn, entitled The Next Act of the Neocons.
And it explained that neocons were preparing in 2014, way before Trump emerged on the scene, to re-migrate to the Democratic Party in the hope of supporting Hillary Clinton and making her president, knowing that it was now the Democratic Party that served as a much more reliable vehicle for the knowing that it was now the Democratic Party that served as a much more reliable And of course, almost all neoconservatives are now Democrats because they turned against the Republican Party fully.
With the arrival of Donald Trump, but even before that happened, they saw the writing on the wall, as represented by Ron Paul and the growing popularity of his ideology.
Listen to what this 2014 op-ed predicted.
Quote, even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat, aligning themselves with Hillary Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign in a bid to return to the driver's seat of American foreign policy.
And the thing is, these neocons have a point.
Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq War, supported sending arms to Syrian rebels, likened Russia's President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, wholeheartedly backs Israel, and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.
In response, Mark Salter, a former chief of staff to Senator McCain and a neocon fellow traveler, said that in the event of a Ron Paul nomination, quote, Republican voters seriously concerned with national security would have no responsible recourse but to support Hillary Clinton for the presidency.
John McCain's key aide was saying, if you care about national security as a Republican and Ron Paul is a nominee, You should vote for Hillary Clinton over Ron Paul.
That's what neocons were already seeing and saying before the emergence of Donald Trump.
And it actually went on to say that one of the key neocons preparing to support Hillary Clinton was Robert Kagan.
of the neocon Kagan family, who is also the husband of Victoria Nuland, who worked for the State Department under Hillary Clinton and then John Kerry.
These neocons knew the Republican Party was becoming more working class and less supportive of the neocon agenda, and that their future lay with the Democratic Party before the arrival of Donald Trump, and it was Ron Paul who, more than anybody, paved the way for that and showed that it was possible.
So for our interview segment, we are happy to present you with Ron Paul, who earned a Doctor of Medicine from Duke University in 1961.
He then became a specialist in obstetrics and gynecology in 1963.
He was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War and spent the next five years in the U.S.
Air Force as a combat flight surgeon.
He was first elected to represent Texas's 22nd congressional district as a Republican in 1978 and proceeded to serve three different times in Congress with his last segment beginning in 1997 through 2013 when he retired from Congress.
His son Rand Paul was elected as a Republican Senator for Kentucky in 2011 and continues to serve today.
Dr. Paul was often a lone voice in championing various causes in the Republican Party, but he was really catapulted to national fame as a result of those two presidential runs.
For the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2012, both of which were far more successful than almost anyone anticipated, finishing with the second highest number of delegates both times.
In 2012, he gave that GOP establishment a serious scare with that third-place finish in Iowa and then a second-place finish to Mitt Romney in New Hampshire.
But during that 2012 campaign and then after, Paul remained one of the most influential figures in the Republican Party as a result of the large crowds of young voters he was attracting all over the country.
And there is now no doubt, having seen Trump, That those two presidential campaigns served as a harbinger of changes in the GOP voting base that Trump successfully identified and then gave voice to in 2016.
We're always excited to speak to Congressman Paul and we sat down just a little bit ago today with him, right before we went on air, to talk about changes in Republican party politics, The two foreign wars Biden is funding and arming with Republican support, the wars of Israel and Ukraine, the abuses of the U.S.
security state, proper relations between U.S.-China, and much more.
We really enjoyed this interview with Dr. Paul, and we are convinced you will too.
Here it is.
Congressman, thank you so much for joining us It's always a pleasure to speak to you.
Great to see you.
Great to be with you, Glenn.
So I was thinking today about your legacy in the Republican Party as a longtime congressman in Texas, as a two-time presidential candidate, and I was thinking about it as essentially a full frontal assault, a challenge of the various orthodoxies of the Republican Party, the longtime orthodoxies on a wide range of issues, certainly including foreign policy and the neoconservative wing that dominated Republican politics for a long time.
The idea that the U.S.
fights too many wars, we pay for the wars of foreign countries way too often when our national interests aren't at stake.
To me, it seems like Trump in 2016 picked up on a lot of the ideas that you were actually spreading in 2008 and 2012, at least in terms of the campaign promises he made.
And I'm wondering, as you look at today's Republican Party, how much progress do you think has actually been made in moving away from conservatism, neoconservatism, to a more anti-interventionist foreign policy?
Yeah, I think there has been advancement, because I talk about the difference between what it was like when I first went to Washington.
You know, it was the money issue of 1971 and closing of the Goldwin, and that sort of thing got me interested in Austrian economics.
So I was first elected in 76, and I now look back sometimes, and they'll ask similar questions, and they'll want me to compare it.
And I think there's a big difference, because when I first went in, nobody was talking about Austrian economics.
Libertarianism was barely mentioned.
And there was essentially, you know, there wasn't a Mises Institute that was leading the charge on Austrian economics.
So I would say there's great growth.
But when people say—you know, and I come down on the side of, I want to be optimistic.
The Glenn Greenwalds are around.
They're coming alive, you know, and I think this is just great.
But others, a typical Republican will say, yeah, but it's a mess and all this stuff, and they're very, very negative.
But Leonard Reed, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, did a lot to help me understand this.
He says, it's not a numbers game.
It's not a numbers game at all.
You know, eventually you need attitudes, prevailing attitudes, but you don't convert 51% of the people.
What you want is to look for special people who are willing to stand up at a PTA meeting and say what everybody else is thinking.
So the leadership issue is the thing, and I think that's where we're making progress.
I think there's a better understanding of Austrian economics.
It's going to be a great necessity, and there is right now.
I think more people, say, own gold today, wanting to protect themselves, than, say, in 1933, when the gold was confiscated, and nobody really cared that much.
So I think there's a lot of progress, but as much as I like to see that progress, I still think we live in very, very dangerous times.
Absolutely.
You know, I think when people think about your presidential campaign and people go back and look at the debates, it's really remarkable the extent to which you were isolated on that stage with candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Mitt Romney, these very conventional Republicans and their lobbyists who filled those debate halls would do what you were saying on things like the Iraq War and 9-11.
And yet, you did much better than I think people expected, and you were going into very red districts in places like Iowa and South Carolina, not just with libertarian economics, but also with this foreign policy message that at the time was not very popular in the elite class, that we were fighting too many wars under the name of the War on Terror, that it was costing ordinary Americans a huge amount of their resources and quality of life because how much we were enriching
Did you find that ordinary Republican voters in these deep red places were more receptive to that message than you had anticipated?
Or what was the reaction when you started kind of in vain against neoconservatism that at the time was dominant in the Republican Party under Bush and Cheney?
I see it in two groups.
And I say, if you're talking about the Chamber of Commerce, no, I wasn't cutting into that.
But amazingly enough, I felt optimistic about going to the liberal universities, you know, where the young people came out and they figured that they were radical left, they wouldn't listen.
And they were much more open-minded, so I was encouraged by that.
But when the conventional Republicans would come up to me and they say, well, we're going to do this, and that was early on, they thought they should just threaten me to behave and that sort of thing.
I said, well, I want to do a comparison.
You have a, you know, we have a constitution.
You take an oath to it.
But I didn't put the pressure on him there, which, you know, I would, but not necessarily.
But what I would do is, is take out their, you know, their document, you know, the platform.
And I said, I'll contest you because Republican platforms sometimes had some good stuff in it.
And I said, why don't you compare the votes on that?
The war issue was a big issue.
And I think what I tried to work on is they made it so that if you didn't go along with all that evil, you were unpatriotic.
And that's what they played on, and I think we sort of cut into that.
I remember the time when I was on a debate, Giuliani-type thing.
They would say, oh, you know, you don't support the troops and all this stuff.
Yeah, it just happened.
I was drafted and served five years in the military, and I was Collecting more money from the military than they were.
So I think that resonated, that people loved that stuff, because they hadn't heard it before.
So I think I changed that a little bit, that if you don't vote for, even now, the NDAA, the vote there is, we used to get, on that kind of stuff, if we got 10 or 12 votes, It was a big deal.
Now there's an argument going on.
Maybe we shouldn't send more money to Ukraine.
Maybe we should think about protecting our borders.
Maybe we should spend that at home.
This sort of thing.
So the attitude, I think, has changed.
But I still think the big issue when it comes to our policies and all is the fact that the debt is too big.
Malinvestment is horrendous.
We have invaded so many countries.
We have an empire that's going bankrupt, losing credibility.
I believe that nothing happens until it's liquidated.
And then there's a reestablishment, a rebirth of the energy, and I see the rebirth coming, and the enthusiasm, but we still have a ways to go, and that to me is what we have to keep working on.
Because I believe there's a sentiment out there.
I think people, you know, when I start talking about, you know, nihilism and, you know, telling the truth all the time, and these people, they live by telling lies.
I think most decent people want to hear that.
And sometimes they need a little encouragement.
But sometimes the people who get to express themselves on the media, and you know all about journalism, And what you have to go through.
But, you know, if you had 50 people that you might have come along with in journalism, you and two other ones might be the ones telling the truth, but you might be the only ones that people really respect.
The other ones, you know, they have to sell their soul in order to make a living.
So to me, the numbers are not the game.
It's speaking the truth.
And there's an audience out there.
So that's the reason I'm encouraged.
Yeah, I'm sure you saw this controversy recently where people rediscovered the Osama Bin Laden letter to Americans in 2002 explaining that the reason Al Qaeda attacked the United States, the reason there was so much anti-American sentiment, wasn't because they hated us for our freedoms, but because they hated that we were bombing their countries and imposing dictatorships.
And there was a lot of pressure.
TikTok had to ban any discussion of that letter.
They didn't want people reading that.
And I remember you having that kind of exchange with Giuliani and the other Republicans on the stage where you were trying to say, look, if we go around the world with these wars, we're going to pay a cost.
People are going to want to attack us back like on 9-11.
And that was a taboo subject.
You were accused of being pro-terrorist and justifying 9-11.
And it was just funny that there was this recent controversy where people discovered the Bin Laden letter.
Let me ask you about a couple of the wars that we're actually fighting now.
You alluded to one in Ukraine.
Before I get to that, I want to ask you about the one in Israel.
Because this is a country, Israel, that has received more foreign aid from the United States over the last several decades than any country by far.
Even though American generals often say that it endangers our national interest to be so tied to Israel and the region, given what they're doing to the Palestinians.
The minute the war started, Biden depleted our own stockpile and sent All kinds of weapons that Israel wanted, asked for another $14 billion in aid to Israel on top of the billions of dollars we give them every year.
And other than a couple of members of Congress in the Republican Party, there's really no opposition at all to this attempt to pay for yet another Israeli war with American resources.
What do you make of this new war in Israel and Gaza and of Biden's posture toward Israel and saying, whatever you need, we're here to give it to you?
Well, I think we've made some inroads, because the debate is a little bit different, and people are starting to say we shouldn't keep sending it to them.
And it always ends.
Our side always wins.
But it's painful, because, you know, the runaway inflation and debt ends.
The markets are powerful, and they end.
And it's tragic, because a lot of innocent people suffer.
But all this ends, and the empire ends.
And the people know this, but no, the one thing is, is we, I as a libertarian, have an easy way to answer when you talk about that war.
But what you should do, should you veto the peace and the resolution of the UN?
Should you send more help to the Palestinians?
Or should you help Israel?
They end up helping everybody.
And, of course, our approach is, well, we got ourselves into that, and Ben Laden was very explicit about that.
You know, he listed three things.
It was the bombing, it was the Palestinians, and it was having troops in Saudi Arabia.
And I would use that as the reason, and actually that blowback principle I was able to quote the CIA.
They're the ones who originally brought the term up.
They said, you know, there'll be blowback.
But then when they found out that it wasn't popular to say that, there were only a few of us that were then speaking out, you know, and saying there is and there's an explanation.
What made me upset about that whole mess and continue to do, whether it's Ukraine or whatever, they don't ask You know, why did they do it?
And you brought this question up.
Why did we do this, you know, with Israel and others?
Why do we send them?
What's the motivation?
And bin Laden is a motivation.
But they never asked that question.
Why did the terrorists bomb us?
And what happens if somebody gets murdered or there's riots and all these things?
Who killed whom?
They'll dissect it out on social terms, and they'll ask, who did this?
Who did this?
And see if they can politicize it.
But they'll ask, who did it?
And why did they do it?
There's always one looking for a motive.
But they did not ask for a motive.
And you brought up the subject.
Well, they should, you know, we should talk about motives, because that's how governments get away with this.
And it's easy.
to control the people if they have access to the people who are in charge of the media.
And you understand that very well, how you can influence people.
But I understand the frustration, but I also understand that when I run into a Glenn Greenwald, I'm excited about it, because our message is getting out there.
Not that we would agree on everything, but stop and think about it.
And that's where the problem is, and that's where I think the hope is.
It's also the reason I stay involved in education.
I have, you know, a small effort Absolutely.
You know, it's interesting.
a lot of people interested in finding out the truth.
I think that's the mandate that we have.
We have to do our best.
If you want to pay any attention or contribute anything, you have to be willing to search for and find out what the truth is all about.
Absolutely.
It's interesting.
As soon as the war in Eastern Europe broke out with the Russian conflict with Ukraine, It was very interesting to me that the only opposition to funding the war in Ukraine the way Joe Biden immediately said he wanted to do with NATO did come from parts of the Republican Party that have become more anti-interventionist.
I interviewed a lot of members of the Republican Congress over the last couple of years, where only not one Democrat voted no.
Every Democrat from AOC and Ilhan Omar to Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer and everyone in between were, yes, let's fund the war in Ukraine.
But the no votes came from this anti-interventionist wing in the Republican Party.
And I did look at that as progress.
And I did look at that as kind of a legacy of, in part at least, your efforts in the Republican Party.
And I would talk to them and they would say things like, look, we have too many problems at home.
We have too much national debt.
We can't afford to fund the foreign, the wars of foreign countries.
They would say Ukraine is not the 51st American state.
This isn't our war.
And every time they would say that to me, Congressman, right, and this was before the Hamas attack.
I would say, well, does that same rationale apply to Israel?
In other words, it's great to hear you saying we shouldn't be funding Ukraine's wars.
We have too many problems at home.
Do you say that for Israel as well?
And they would immediately start stumbling and looking for reasons why Israel was different.
Why do you think that so many Republicans, even the ones willing to stand up on Ukraine, are not willing to do the same when it comes to questioning why we fund Israel's wars?
Well, I think it's an atmosphere, it's an attitude that's been around for a long time, because who's controlling the message?
Because if you say something that sounds like, I'm not ever going to vote for a foreign aid for Israel.
Well, that's anti-Semitic, and you're a monster then.
But if you say the best way to solve this, you don't send money to either side.
You don't send money to the Palestinians, you don't send money, you don't have an empire, and you don't do that.
Just think, it just amazes me how many times have some American units The military unit's been hit in the last couple months over a hundred times, and people are saying, they're bombing Americans and we have to do more.
When I was trying to stop the march to war in the Middle East under Bush, I made them to vote on a declaration of war.
Just to put it on record, I said, if you guys want war, you have to vote for it.
And boy, I was on the committee for that.
And boy, did they hit me hard on that.
They said, they've been attacking us.
I said, you have to have an aggression against them.
They have been.
They've been aggression.
They've been shooting at our airplanes.
Absolutely, yeah.
I think it's, you know, so interesting.
bomb, and they decided that was aggression against America.
And it just fly by.
So total ignorance.
And that's why we need to keep working on building the people who are sending the message out.
And we need to cultivate a lot more good journalists, I'll tell you that.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I think it's so interesting.
We hear in these news reports, oh, American bases in Syria, in Iraq, have been attacked again with the flare-up in the region.
And I think a lot of people say, wait, we have military bases in Syria and Iraq still?
Why do we have those there?
And when did Congress approve those?
It's just such a kind of normalized part of our discourse that we just have troops in essentially every country.
One of the other challenges that you Frequently defended in challenging Republican orthodoxy was on civil liberties as well.
And I think it's very clear that there's more space than ever in the Republican Party to do things like harbor skepticism for the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security, especially the ways in which they interfere in our domestic politics, spy on our American citizens, the NSA for sure.
Do you think that that newfound skepticism in the Republican Party is due to the fact that those agencies seem to have targeted President Trump and tried to undermine his presidency?
Or do you think there's a more principled awakening on the part of parts of the American right about how pernicious and dangerous these agencies are when unleashed on our own citizenry?
Yeah, I think it's always been both.
It has been less genuine until recently.
I think it's getting that way.
You know, I get a chuckle out of it, you know, now they're deciding on whether the president or Trump is allowed to be on the ballot.
And every once in a while you'll get a Democrat Yeah, that doesn't fall in line, and he has the right answer.
He says, you know that you do it against us, too.
They're starting to look at it.
And not that they've come to a good position, but they're getting to see if this goes on, you know, it's going to spread and make it worse.
You know, when 9-11 occurred, it was within hours they started talking about the Patriot Act.
And within a day or two, they had it on the floor.
And there was essentially really no debate at all.
It had been written a while back.
And there was somebody sitting beside me, a friend, who frequently would vote with me.
And I said, and he was voting no and yes, and I was voting no.
I said, what are you voting yes for?
You know that this is bad.
He says, yes, but how am I going to go home And after 9-11, I tell my constituents that I voted against the Patriot Act.
He just threw up his hands.
He surrendered to it.
And all I did tell him, I said, well, that's your job.
Go back home and explain it.
Yeah, you represented a not exactly left-wing district in Texas and managed to keep going back and getting re-elected even while you were taking these positions so contrary in so many ways to Republican Party orthodoxy.
Another area where you did that is the war on drugs and the general idea that we are imprisoning more of our population than any other country.
In the world.
And you know, it's so funny how often perceptions are distorted because of the media.
So it was actually Joe Biden who probably more than anybody in the Senate played a leading role in kind of constructing the legal architecture that led to the war on drugs, people being incarcerated in huge numbers for possessing drugs.
Including just the prison industrial system in general, and it was Donald Trump who signed one of the first criminal justice reform bills in many, many years.
I'm wondering whether you think with rising crime rates in our cities and the perception that our cities are falling apart, that there's still potential progress that can be made in reducing some of these laws that are just still imprisoning American citizens en masse, and what kind of work is still needed on those issues?
Well, they're still working on it, and they picked different drugs to, you know, accuse them of.
And fentanyl.
Fentanyl is a little bit harder to defend.
Just make it legal.
And because, you know, Marijuana is legal now, for the most part, and that has, you know, made it so people didn't have to kill people each other.
But fentanyl is a little touchier subject.
But I think you apply all those rules together, and it's trying to compare it to that.
I said, how many And I found some articles, and I don't know how accurate this is, but the principle is, more people die from alcohol and related diseases and accidents than everybody else.
They do from fentanyl.
So if I tell people that, I say, what, do you want to go back to, you know, prohibition?
Oh, no, we don't mean that, because 92% of the, I don't know what the percentage is, a lot of people in Congress drink alcohol.
That's for sure.
They're not going to change that.
But I think it's a job.
But I think you're going to apply the same rules to all of it, because everything is dangerous.
You know, you might put it up to a conservative that wants to regulate the drugs, and yet you say, well, do you think A lot of people died, but the liberals tell us a lot of people die unnecessarily with guns.
I said, why don't we regulate these guns and do something about the guns?
Oh no, that's different.
When we were Early on, we had a debate, and I was debating in a friendly way a very liberal congressman from Texas, and he was against the reintroduction of registration for the military.
And I voted with him, which people hadn't figured me out yet.
And he was so amazed about this Because I made a statement.
I said, why are you guys, my conservative Republican friends, why do you want to register people you won't even register your guns?
So this liberal came up and he says, boy, I wish I had thought of that one.
Yeah, yeah.
Sometimes it just takes confronting people with their principles and it is hard to get people to reconcile those.
I have a couple more questions.
This is the limited time that we have.
I want to respect your time.
I want to ask you about China because I do have a lot of conservative friends, people who come to my show.
We have a lot of agreement.
They seem to have a really anti-interventionist perspective now.
They don't think the United States should be fighting as many wars, but there's always one country that the security state can feed people and say, no, this is the really dangerous country.
And I think there is still a perception on the part of a lot of conservatives that even though a lot of these countries were presented with like Russia aren't real threats, China is a real threat to the United States and maybe we need to have a cold war, even a hot war over Taiwan.
What is your view of the proper relationship between the United States and China?
Do we see them as an enemy, a competitor, a potential trading partner?
How do you see the US-China relationship?
Well, I think the hawk Republicans are a little bit confused on this because it is true.
China is a competitor and we've got to watch them because they're taking our dollars and they're investing them overseas.
They're better investors than we are.
You know, what do we We do.
We spend it all on the military and go around the world, and we're going broke.
And they go and they invest overseas, and then our people complain a whole lot.
Oh, you know, they have control of this and this and this.
No, I think there's way too much China bashing.
I was in high school during the time the Korean War was going on.
I was drafted during the Vietnam War.
And the Korean War was just, you know, never made any sense to me.
And yet that was one of the big things, that they had the Korean War, and we had to It was terrible because one of my teachers got redrafted, went over there and got killed.
That was part of my growing up about this issue.
But the Korean War, what I want to say about that was it brought to light Nixon and that bad guy Kissinger.
China is very competitive.
And now there's all this, any chance they can bash China, they do.
But China is very competitive.
And how did they get all our money?
Well, we failed to satisfy our consumers of the right price for the right product.
So we all went and bought all that stuff from China.
And then they turned it around and say it's all China's fault.
So it's just a gimmick.
And China is far from far from angels.
I think, as Rand has pointed out, that they're probably guilty of messing around with viruses and all this stuff.
But I think what Nixon did by going over there, that was a big event, I'll tell you, when it was nothing but war and killing and all this stuff.
And we had an opportunity, sort of like the opportunity we had when the Cold War ended with Russia and the Soviets.
And we blew that, even though there's still remnants of the benefits from this.
But there was, I think, tremendous benefits by opening up the door with China, because I strongly believe what the founders believed, that if you trade with people and travel with people and share ideas, you're much better off and you're much less likely to start a shooting war.
And right now we're moving in a direction that some people would like to.
With Taiwan.
People want to bomb them already.
Does that make sure they never attack Taiwan?
Well, you know, that doesn't make any sense to me.
The possibility of when I come to the U.S., coming to where you are in Texas, sitting down with you for a much longer conversation on your show, which I would absolutely love to do.
It's always a pleasure.
I see you as really one of the pivotal figures in the Republican Party, the kind of precursor to Trump.
I think it's starting to become a lot more visible than ever, the effect you had on Republican voters, and so I'd love to explore that more with you.
I hope to be able to do that, and I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to me today.
