Media & War! Daniel McAdams Opens the Ron Paul Institute Washington Conference
Why does the US mainstream media collude with the government to promote pointless wars? Why are government and "Big Social Media" colluding to destroy alternative and antiwar viewpoints? RPI Director Daniel McAdams opens this year's Ron Paul Institute Washington Conference. This segment also includes remarks by RPI's newest Board Member, businessman and philanthropist Gary Heavin.
Why does the US mainstream media collude with the government to promote pointless wars? Why are government and "Big Social Media" colluding to destroy alternative and antiwar viewpoints? RPI Director Daniel McAdams opens this year's Ron Paul Institute Washington Conference. This segment also includes remarks by RPI's newest Board Member, businessman and philanthropist Gary Heavin.
Why does the US mainstream media collude with the government to promote pointless wars? Why are government and "Big Social Media" colluding to destroy alternative and antiwar viewpoints? RPI Director Daniel McAdams opens this year's Ron Paul Institute Washington Conference. This segment also includes remarks by RPI's newest Board Member, businessman and philanthropist Gary Heavin.
So I'd like to welcome everyone to our third Washington conference and our third sold-out conference.
It's awfully great to see everyone here.
Dr. Paul and I do our little show from a little studio in Clute with a bug problem, and I won't go into details, but sometimes you wonder when you're sitting there doing the show every day whether anyone's listening or anyone's watching, and that's why we both agree it's so great to come out and actually visit and talk with people.
So, that means I first want to thank the audience, and I want to ask a question.
How many of you, if you don't mind raising your hands, have been to all three of the events?
Wow, that's great.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Hope to see you at the next one if we can do it.
So, secondly, I would like to thank the speakers.
These are people that in many cases we've known for a number of years.
Many of them spoke at Dr. Paul's famous Thursday lunches on Capitol Hill, where we had, I'm sure you've read about it, we had groups of Republican congressmen come in who were feeling a bit skeptical about the war, but were basically afraid to express some of those views on the floor of the House.
So, we brought in some great speakers who they would be comfortable with, but who were able to allow them to entertain that skepticism.
And I will mention those who were there.
But these speakers are giving freely of their time.
They're giving freely of their vast experience in Washington and in academia and elsewhere in foreign policy and other things.
They're giving that to us as a gift.
They're sharing their knowledge and experience with us, and we are extremely grateful for them.
So I'd like to thank them as well.
I'd also very much like to thank our sponsors.
We have gold and silver-level sponsors.
These are people who, through their generosity, we are able to have these conferences.
The price of admission, as you can imagine, doesn't cover the cost of six months of putting together an event like this.
So, there are some people that step up to the plate, and I won't name names that are, there are some who've stepped up to the plate three times to sponsor each of these, and we're deeply, deeply grateful for their generosity in keeping these things alive.
And I hope some of you out there that may like what you see today might consider thinking about doing that in a future conference.
It's just critical to what we do.
I'd also like to thank my family and Jeff Dice, the president of the Mises Institute's family.
They're helping out.
They're doing all the work out there, and they put a lot of effort into it.
So I sure do appreciate having my kids work for me.
A little bit about the Ron Paul Institute.
I'm sure many of you know, but we're this year celebrating our fifth anniversary.
A lot of people said there's no way you're going to get this thing off the ground.
People are not interested in foreign policy.
You know, they only want to talk about politics.
They're not interested in these affairs.
But Dr. Paul rightly saw that there was a real need for an absolute non-interventionist organization.
We don't put our fingers up to the wind and see which way it's blowing.
We don't weasel our words around with policy papers.
Well, on the one hand, this, on the other hand, that.
We're very straightforward, and it's a very simple thing.
And I think surviving for five years with the help of a lot of our donors and friends like you have made it possible.
But we are really the kind of broad coalition that a lot of people like to talk about, but actually, in practice, we are it.
We had, for example, last year we had Dennis Kucinich speak from the left side.
We've had many from the conservative side speak.
We want to embrace and we want to, in the spirit of what Dr. Paul did on Capital, he'll embrace all of those who share concerns about our foreign policy, the way, for example, the Federal Reserve helps to finance our wars and keeps them hidden from the people that pay for them, and for the increasing attacks on our civil liberties.
And, you know, in that case, you can't get more timely than today when we're talking about attacks on speech and civil liberties.
And we'll get into that a bit more when we get into the meat of the conference.
Just a gentle reminder: there are donation cards on the table.
We do very, very much appreciate your support and we need your support.
We make every penny go as far as possible.
So, if you do see it in your heart to give a little more, we would really appreciate it.
So, today, what we're talking about, and we thought about, we thought this up back in March, and little did we know how appropriate it would be.
But we're talking about media and war, the role of the mainstream media, the role of the media in promoting government wars.
I think we're seeing now with the rise of not only the internet but of the alternative media gaining strength, and you're seeing the continued decline of the legacy media, the mainstream media, you're seeing that legacy media desperate.
It's losing the narrative, it's losing its ability to control the narrative, to control what we see and think.
You no longer have to flip on your news and watch a talking head to tell you what to think that day.
You can go to websites like the Ron Paul Institute, you can go to websites like Trends Research.
We have so many different websites, Lou Rockwell, anti-war.com, and many more that you can go to.
And that makes them very nervous.
They don't like that.
They want to control the narrative.
And so, you're seeing an attack on alternative media in many ways.
And we'll explore some of those today.
We do know, for example, and this is one of our early inspirations.
Dr. Paul and I have talked about this a lot on the Liberty Report.
I think this is a great example, just in a nutshell, we can just keep it to this.
So, here's what happened in the election.
You may have heard the Russians got Trump elected.
It's amazing.
It was such a feat, you know.
But then, so what you know, the people who lost and the people who were afraid, who felt threatened by this change, whatever you think of the individual who ultimately won, what happened is they needed to develop a new narrative, and this is the narrative they developed.
They needed to find somebody to blame.
So, they blame places like Facebook, and they dragged, like they do with all CEOs that they want to put under the gun.
They dragged them up to Capitol Hill.
Senator from this very state said, You know, if you don't do what we say, we're going to shut you down.
We're going to make your life miserable.
You better crack down on all these Russian bots that are going through here getting Trump and all these people elected.
You better do it right away.
And so, as unfortunately, as CEOs do, they back down to the government.
Please just tell us what we can do.
Tell us what we can do to make you happy.
Instead of telling them to go fly a kite, and so what did they do?
They hired the Atlantic Council, the Atlantic Council, to come in, make sure, check everyone, make sure whoever's posting is who they say they are, make sure they're not pushing foreign propaganda.
Don't dare do that.
And what this is, is a criminalization of dissent.
And that's essentially what they do because the Atlantic Council is in the business of criminalizing dissent.
It's a pseudo-think tank, but it's funded by the U.S. government.
It's funded by the big defense contractors.
It's also funded by foreign governments.
United Arab Emirates gives them a million bucks, at least according to their website, probably many, many more times that.
So, here you have a foreign-funded think tank that's going to help Facebook suss out foreign-funded people posting on Facebook.
And you also have something even more chilling where the U.S. government is funding an entity that restricts our speech.
So, the argument that Facebook is a private company, that is an argument, but the involvement of government in trying to silence and dissent.
And we saw from the 32 accounts that they recently banned because they were phony accounts.
Well, guess what?
A lot of them weren't.
So they're wrong most of the time.
They pretend that they have a science about this, when in reality it's about the criminalization of dissent.
And what's the problem?
Well, the mainstream media is always wrong, especially when it comes to matters of war and peace.
They swallow the government line, they repeat it uncritically, and people are simply not willing to accept it anymore.
We've been fooled in Iraq, in Libya, and elsewhere, in Syria and elsewhere, and people are sick of it.
So the media is fighting back.
And some of you may have noticed a little brouhaha with one of our speakers last year on the whistleblowers panel, and that was Peter Van Buren, who was permanently banned for life and I think a few other afterlifes from Twitter for this horrible crime.
And what was the crime?
I was there on the scene and played a minor role in it, but Peter got into a dust-up.
And this all may seem silly, but you need to step back and think of the larger context of what happened.
Peter Van Buren is a 27-year-old, was a 27-year State Department employee.
He was sent to Iraq.
He looked at what was happening there, the reconstruction efforts, and realized it was all baloney.
And he became a whistleblower and wrote what I think is probably the most important book written about Iraq, We Meant Well.
And if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.
So here's a whistleblower who was there and who knew it.
Well, he got on a thread started by Glenn Greenwald on Twitter, where Greenwald was talking about how the media facilitates war by uncritically repeating what the government says.
And so Peter Van Buren got onto the thread and said, Hey, that's what I did for 27 years.
The government had me lie to you, mainstream media.
That was my job.
And why were you so stupid, so lazy?
Or what were you that you bought at hook, line, and sinker?
You were never critical about what I told you.
I was lying to you.
You know, why didn't you at least check it with someone?
And he said on our show, we had him on the show a little while ago.
They didn't want to get the story.
They just wanted to get a story.
And they didn't want to alienate themselves from their sources.
So Peter did that, and he made a sarcastic comment afterward about someone who was particularly vile toward him, a comment making fun of that person's disdain for Trump supporters.
And it wasn't a foul word.
Some of you know what he said.
But that apparently got him banned for life.
And Scott Horton and I, Scott Hortonantiwar.com, and I said a couple of things about how this person shouldn't have bragged about getting Peter banned, and we were suspended for a while.
So it's a long story, and it seems somewhat frivolous until you think about what's happening.
Peter had some very important things to say to us, and through the collusion, really, of the mainstream media, not wanting this message to get out, not wanting us to find out that there are alternatives.
If he disappears, if all of his posts disappear, if all of our posts, everything that we do is disappeared, and it can be with the flip of a switch.
It really is a modern-day book burning, and it's very chilling.
So I think those of us who are challenging the mainstream narrative are and should be very concerned about this.
Gary Haven's Impact00:02:50
So that is why we wanted to get together to talk about this.
When we thought this up in March, wow, we didn't realize.
And in fact, one of our speakers, Caitlin Johnstone, was just suspended and banned from Twitter last night.
And so thank you.
It's good timing.
And she'll tell us all about it, but this is going to shock you.
She was critical of John McCain.
And so that got her taken out.
But I do want to also make an announcement.
We have a terrific board of advisors and academic board, and they're with us, and they guide us in what we do.
In many cases, they're people that we've known for a number of years.
In some cases, they're people that we've just met, but we're so happy to meet and so impressed by that we want to have them join us right away and help us.
And that brings me to Gary Haven.
Dr. Paul and I had lunch with Gary, I think it was back in March in Lake Jackson, and we had such a terrific conversation.
Gary is an amazing person.
He's one of these legendary guys who doesn't sit around in college counting his belly buttons.
He went out and he started a business.
He was very successful.
He's from Texas, which isn't bad.
He's the founder of Curves International, which was very popular among ladies.
It's very popular exercise.
But he's not just that.
Gary was a very successful businessman, and he turned his eyes toward philanthropy and what he could do to help his fellow man.
And wherever there's a tragedy, wherever there's something wrong somewhere, Gary gets in his plane, seatbelts up, and he's there.
He was, I think I'm right, he was ferrying Senator Paul down to several eye surgeries down in Central America.
And I think that's where he met Senator Paul and how he kind of came into our orbit.
He's a very modest man, and he probably doesn't like me saying so much about him in public, but he's the kind of guy that makes a difference.
In places like Haiti, where people are living in horrifically terrible, dreadful situations, Gary is there actually really making a difference on the ground.
So what a terrific guy, and we're so happy to have him as our newest board member.
Thank you very much, Gary.
And Gary, if you would come up and introduce yourself and say hi to everyone, that'd be great.
Dan, thank you for those kind words.
You know, I'm always uncomfortable when people talk about that because, you know, when you go to places like Haiti and you deliver food, and we were the only air EVAC for two of the cities there after Hurricane Matthew.
And I'd fly in in a turbocharged caravan that can land on a goat field with 2,500 pounds of food.
Delivering Hope00:03:07
We'd offload it to the starving people.
And then we'd take the wounded from the hurricane on the plane.
And I'd take off from a goat field with the plane stacked with people.
No seatbelts, by the way.
If it had happened in this country, I'd not have a pilot's license today.
And we'd fly back to Port-au-Prince, and we were bringing back so many people.
I actually leased an ambulance for six weeks to get them to the hospitals.
And of course, in Haiti, somebody had to pay the hospital bill in advance before they would accept the patients.
I'm talking about children.
And so I spent a million dollars in six weeks.
Greatest million bucks I've ever spent in my life.
That's kind of my point.
I feel guilty for even talking about it and getting some kind of accolades for it because I had the time of my life.
It was the most rewarding experience you could ever imagine.
By the way, my wife was there with me.
She handled logistics.
We had to come up with 10,000 pounds of food a day to keep the planes.
I brought three aircraft there.
But my point is, I got more out of it than I put in it.
I feel guilty for even being recognized for it.
But, you know, that's one of the things about giving or being true to your purpose in life.
My wife and I founded Curves many, many years ago, and Curves became the largest fitness franchise in the world.
It became the 10th largest of all franchises in the world.
At one time, there was one Curves for every three McDonald's in America.
I used to say we were doing our best to make up for the damage McDonald's was causing society.
But you know, I was, I've always been a free thinker.
They sent me to military school for high school, Texas Military Institute.
And I was there 9th, 10th, 11th grade.
Last day of 11th grade, they said, Mr. Haven, we don't want you to come back for your senior year.
You're just not a fit here.
At the time, I was kind of disappointed, but I didn't realize what a blessing it was.
I've always been a nonconformist.
And, you know, when I was older, I looked at the fitness business, and women had no place to go.
You know, they weren't comfortable going to the gyms.
The men were there.
They were staring at their behinds, right?
It was intimidating.
And so women were the stepchildren of the gyms of America.
And I thought, why don't we create a place where women can be comfortable, where you can remove the barriers.
In other words, I was thinking out of the box.
I was willing to think differently than other people.
And so it really was a blessing.
And at one point, you know, we got your mothers and your sisters and your grandmothers into the gym for the first time.
There were 4 million members in America alone.
By the way, we're in 90 countries.
And 3% of the adult female population of America were working out of curves.
And these were people that wouldn't go to another gym.
They wouldn't have worked out otherwise.
Thinking Differently00:04:52
So we were making a difference.
And I was really proud of that.
But you know, it wasn't always that easy.
I was a millionaire at age 25.
And by the way, I left home at 16.
But I was a millionaire at 25.
And then I was bankrupt at 30.
And then I was a billionaire at 50.
And so people say, well, what happened?
What did you learn in there that changed your trajectory?
And I'll share this wisdom with you.
I was a self-made millionaire in my 20s.
And it was about me.
And God had to remove everything until I became teachable.
By the way, all of us, unfortunately, are only really teachable after we suffer sufficiently.
And so when I realized it was not about me, it was about you.
It was about others.
And my life began to focus on other people and having a servant's heart.
When I showed up to care and to serve, which is what we do in Haiti, then things began to be blessable.
I was blessable and began to be blessed.
So two things real quick.
In my retirement now, which is a nonsense word, I learned that you can make movies that make a difference, movies with a message.
This movie, Americeddon, it was out a couple years ago.
It was quite successful.
There's a copy for all of you out on the table there.
Feel free to take one with you.
And it was a platform to allow me to tell people about the loss of freedom that we have going on in our country right now.
You know, things like the National Defense Authorization Act, which completely obliterates our right to due process.
A constitutional right.
It's absolutely critical.
It's gone, guys.
And this allowed me to do that.
Executive Order 13603 that Obama signed that gave the government the right to take our resources, put us to work with no pay.
It is written and codified into either law or executive order.
So this movie allowed me to, using the background of North Korea attacking the U.S. with an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse, which, by the way, do you know how timely it was over the last couple of years?
But it was a way for me to teach people about the state of our freedoms in this country.
Another little movie that I just had a small role in, it's coming out in January or so, is Roe v. Wade.
It's the true story about how abortion became illegal in America.
And if you're a pursuer of truth, you're going to like this movie because it tells people how it came about.
And it was a nasty, ugly, very undemocratic process that now has led to the death of 60 million of our unborn children.
And by the way, as the head of a women's brand, me being pro-life, can you imagine how I was attacked by the liberals?
There were bomb scares.
They were going to blow up curves in those tolerant cities of San Francisco and Boston.
They would paint it on the sides and stuff.
So that's kind of been there, done that, but I'm a pursuer of truth.
I forget who said this, but we measure a man's faith by the amount of truth that he can tolerate.
How much truth can you tolerate?
Because truth's uncomfortable, guys.
And boy, do we want comfort.
We want to avoid being uncomfortable, whether it's exercising or being ridiculed.
Oh my gosh, they're going to ridicule if you say something that's not politically correct.
Guys, as a truth seeker, what are you willing to tolerate?
And then secondarily, what are you willing to do with the truth?
And I'm so proud to be standing in this room today.
These speakers are extraordinary.
Dr. Paul is a legend.
These people are able to articulate truth in a reasonable, fair-minded, thoughtful way.
And that's an art.
And I know the people in this room, I'm really so proud to be in front of you.
All of you are seeking ways to share the truth in an articulate, loving way so that we all can move forward together.
You know, you can't cause a reasonable thinking man to do bad things.