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Sept. 14, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
14:47
'Real Anti Interventionism' - Daniel McAdams

Ron Paul Institute Director Daniel McAdams opens this year's Peace and Prosperity Washington conference with some thoughts on what anti-interventionism really means and why non-intervention is so important to our national security and our moral and financial future.

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Grateful Speakers Tribute 00:05:55
All right, well I'd like to welcome you to the fourth annual Ron Paul Institute Washington Conference this year, Breaking Washington's Addiction to War.
And I'm very happy to say this is our fourth consecutive year of selling every ticket we have to offer, so we're very happy about that.
I'm going to run through a few kind of housekeeping items, but they're very important items.
First of all, I would like to thank our speakers today.
As you can see from the program, we have a great group of speakers, people who are following things closely and have very unique and important insights.
These individuals have spent their lives studying these topics and talking about these topics, and they're coming to us today to give of their time freely.
They are here as volunteers, volunteering their information to help educate all of us.
And so we are very grateful for our speakers today.
Also, very importantly, we're thankful to our sponsors today.
And you'll see there are a few tables here that are reserved.
These are the people who are in our host committee.
They step up to the plate very early in the year when we announce the conference, and they give us a boost.
They help us get started.
They help us financially because it takes a good part of a year to organize these things and put them together.
So they come up and they help us get things started.
And some of them have done it every year that we've been here.
And we're very grateful to them.
What we do with host committee members, for those of you who might be interested, is we had a wonderful reception last night, a cocktail reception.
Everyone got to know each other in a small setting.
And we have a reception afterward for host committee members, gold and silver afterward.
And they're actually, they'll meet in the chantilly room for those of you who are on the committee afterward.
So if you'd like to be a committee member next time and really be a part of the conference in a more complete way, send me an email and we can talk about it.
I do have to thank my family who spends a lot of time helping me.
And I'm grateful to have the kind of job where my kids and my family can help me and be part of what I do.
So I'm grateful and thankful to them.
We are thankful to C-SPAN and RT for coming and covering this conference.
We're grateful for them taking some time out of their day to cover what I think is very important, which is this need, this desperate need of our country to change the course of our foreign policy.
So thanks to these organizations, many millions more will see what we're saying today than otherwise might have.
So we're grateful to them.
But most of all, as Neil Young said in 1979, what a great audience.
So thank all of you for being here.
You make it happen.
If we didn't have you, yes.
If we didn't have you, we'd be talking to ourselves.
America wouldn't hear what we have to say because it would indicate that no one is interested.
And you represent many thousands and tens of thousands more that aren't here, that are thinking these things that may not be able to connect the dots.
And hopefully we can help them connect the dots today.
So it really is on you that we appreciate that are keeping this thing alive.
And I would also like to say feel free to take some photos on your phone and tweet it.
Use the hashtag Ron Paul.
I always like afterward to go back and look at people's pictures and things.
So if you're inclined to do that, just use a Ron Paul hashtag and send it out and we'll all have fun later.
The important thing about these kinds of organizations, these kinds of conferences, is that people get together.
And I love hearing people when they get in, they talk.
They have things in common.
They share common interests.
So it's very important.
This is one of the most important things that we have.
I also would like to finally welcome a new group, a new project that the Ron Paul Institute has launched this year, and that is the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar.
And we have our scholars right here at a special table.
I'm going to give them a round of applause.
We put them through foreign policy boot camp yesterday.
We had a grueling, grueling full day of speeches and discussions, and it was like a graduate school seminar.
And we had some wonderful sponsors for that, which we also think you'll see them on the program.
So this is, we're very excited about this new project.
This is a goal that we've had since we started the Ron Paul Institute in 2013, which is to really emphasize reaching out to the next generation, because a lot of us are getting older, and we know that the future is in their hands.
So we're developing the cadres we need to continue the peace, the prosperity, the liberty movement.
And so we're grateful to our students.
They were terrific.
They were so attentive.
They were so bright and on top of things.
So we're excited about that.
The Ron Paul Institute, most of you know, was founded in 2013 after Dr. Paul left Congress.
The purpose is primarily to continue his mission in the area of foreign policy and civil liberties to push for a peace and prosperity foreign policy and the restoration of our stolen civil liberties here in the United States.
We have a few products.
This is one of our main products where we all get together and we do it a couple times.
We did one in Houston in May on the drug war, which is a very important issue as well.
We have the daily Ron Paul Liberty Report.
I hope some of you, is anyone watching it that's here?
We have, we're getting close to 200,000 subscribers, Dr. Paul, if you're here, and 20 million views.
And there are no cats involved.
Washington's War Addiction 00:08:49
So it's kind of harder.
He and I get depressed sometimes because the topics are kind of depressing when we talk about the mayhem that's going on.
But that makes it all the more, that makes us all the happier that we are growing in our audience.
It's so important.
So I'm going to talk for just about 10 minutes, I think, on the topic, which is Washington's addiction to war.
Everyone's like, why do you want to have a conference in Washington?
It's so horrible getting around the traffic.
It's horrible.
That's true, but that's why we're here in a way, because you can't avoid, especially when you come out here, you can't avoid the 28th corridor.
You can't avoid looking at all of these shiny buildings, multi-story buildings.
This, folks, is a military-industrial complex.
These are the people who are getting rich, ripping off the rest of America, ripping off middle America, ripping off working America.
They're doing it by selling a lie, which is the lie that we are everywhere and in every place and at all times at risk.
We're about to be invaded by Syria, by North Korea.
We've got to keep building.
A trillion dollars a year isn't enough.
We need $2 trillion.
We need it for defense.
Well, it's not for defense.
And we know that because nobody's about to invade us.
We're not pacifists.
Of course, we need to have self-defense.
But what we have isn't defense.
We don't need to spend more than the next seven or so countries combined on a military-industrial complex that hasn't been that great at winning wars lately, if you notice.
And I don't blame necessarily the people who are involved.
I blame the policymakers because they're stupid wars.
So this is why we're here.
This is why we're in the military-industrial complex area talking about it.
And sadly, in Washington, even the doves are hawks.
You know, that's really how bad things have gotten.
Oh, I'm totally against bombing Syria.
Let's just do some sanctions.
Oh, yeah, let's not invade Venezuela.
I'm totally, let's sanction them.
You know, that's a great idea.
And meanwhile, there was a study recently: 40,000 Venezuelan citizens, not government leaders, citizens may have died because of the sanctions that were tightened starting in 2017.
We did a show, Dr. Paul and I last week, I think it was, on Iran.
Oh, the sanctions, oh, no, no, medicine, food.
That's not, no.
It is involved.
It is part of it because of the way the markets work, the way supply chains work.
The medicines are not arriving to people of Iran who bear no fault for whatever the real or imagined sins of their leaders are.
The people can't get medicine.
They can't manufacture it because the raw materials that they need to manufacture them have to be imported, and those are subject to sanction.
That's the way it works.
And that's why the people suffer.
In Syria, we can't even let them sell a gallon of gas or a barrel of oil.
Who suffers from that?
Sanctions.
So, unfortunately, doves tend to like sanctions because they believe they're not war.
They're actually the worst kind of war because they hit the civilian population first.
So, in yesterday's scholars' seminar, we talked about the national security state.
And that's essentially, unfortunately, folks, what we have in the United States.
And Jacob Hornberger, who's not with us today, gave a terrific talk explaining to the students what the national security state is.
And one important component of it is the fact that the state surveills us.
We are the enemy.
We are the targets of surveillance.
And in fact, we keep referencing our shows.
We did a show last week about how they want the outgoing Dan Coates, the outgoing DNI, the Director of National Intelligence, sent a letter to Congress on his way out saying, Hey, by the way, those provisions of the Freedom Act should be permanent.
They shouldn't sunset at the end of the year.
Well, among those provisions was one that they could listen to our phone calls and read our text messages.
And guess what?
The Freedom Act was a reform bill because the Patriot Act, we discovered, was completely illegal thanks to Ed Snowden and his brave move to let us know what our government was doing.
so patriarch pass don't worry we're just going to hit terrorists no no big deal don't worry about it Then all of a sudden, Snowden comes and says, You're all under surveillance.
What are you talking about?
Everything you do.
And then the guy who wrote the Patriot Act said, oh gosh, you got me.
I'll reform it.
I'll write the Freedom Act.
Which was worse because it took all of the illegal things in the Patriot Act and made them legal.
And so that's what we have now.
Reform is really a four-letter word.
So it makes spying on us permanent.
The national security state creates crises to appear to solve them so as to justify ripping us off, taking trillions of dollars, taking the biggest chunk of the money that we have.
The truth is, the American government cannot solve people's problems overseas.
It can't even solve our own problems here at home.
There's no way to reorder, reorganize, or to order a complex society 4,000 miles away with people who can't even speak the language.
So the idea that we can do that from Washington is absurd.
It's absolutely absurd.
So we find ourselves in places like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Hong Kong.
They all bear the marks of U.S. interventionism.
The U.S. creates trouble, creates problems, so as to give the appearance of solving the problems.
But in the end, all we see is mayhem and misery.
If anyone would like to talk about any of these places being remotely better off after we fixed it, I would give you the microphone because the truth is we can't.
It's impossible to do this.
Yet they continue to do it.
They continue to make enemies overseas.
See, even if you don't care about all these foreigners who are getting bombed and starved, all the kids getting blown up overseas, even if you're a real hard-nosed guy and don't care about it, the fact is it is not making us safer.
It's making us less safe.
We're creating millions of people who dream day and night about someday getting their revenge because we blew up their families.
So this is a big problem, even if you don't care about the humanitarian stuff.
So how do we fix it?
How do we break Washington's addiction to war?
First, we have to reclaim the use of language.
It's not a defense budget.
It's a military budget.
It's not foreign aid.
It's ripping us off to give it to dictators, to bad people overseas who will continue to do bad things, or to cajole them, or to overthrow people we don't like.
Finally, we have to follow the money.
This is what makes the machine go.
And it's not real money, and I'm sure great people like David Stockman are going to tell us later.
It's funny money.
It's phony money.
The Federal Reserve makes this all possible.
They print money out of thin air.
They don't even print it.
It just created out of thin air that keeps all of this machine humming, all of the Washington war machine humming, gives the impression that things are going well.
It creates jobs instead of what, as we'd ask.
I drove up here from Texas, and literally every road I was on, I felt like I was in Albania.
The country's falling apart.
It's a mess.
And meanwhile, people are living in, they're building more and more mansions.
They're ripping out more and more trees to build mansions here.
So follow the money.
The money comes from the Fed.
It goes to the military contractors.
From the military contractors, they peel off a few bucks and give it to the think tanks.
Go to any Beltway think tank and look at who gives them money.
It'll be Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, all of the people who are making, they'll make a billion and then they'll give a couple of million to a think tank.
The think tank will have very serious scholars who will write a very serious paper about how we need to take out so-and-so.
And that's how it works.
And on and on it goes.
And you add in the congressional to the military-industrial complex and you see the revolving door of military officers, of intelligence professionals who all of a sudden become experts on TV telling us, we've got to take out so-and-so.
I spent a lot of years in intelligence.
I can't tell you why, but we got to take out so-and-so.
Trust me.
So this is a problem.
It's an endemic problem.
And it all comes back to money.
It all comes back to us taking back the use of language.
And it all comes back most importantly.
And that's why we're here to educating ourselves, to learning, to being able to be facile, to talk to our friends and neighbors in a polite way about these things.
And so that is why we're here.
And that's why we should all be excited.
We should all be proud.
You're part of an important remnant that really cares about this country.
Real patriots who love America and love the country and are taking time out of a Saturday, out of busy lives to try to do something about it.
And that's very important.
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