A political tidal wave broke over Italy over the weekend, as voters by a large majority elected a right-wing government. European Union officials warned Italians not to vote the "wrong" way...but they did anyway. What is the bigger picture? Also today, a vote in Ukraine's eastern provinces promises escalation. And...guess who's got covid...again?
Watch the Liberty Report LIVE Every weekday at 12pm EST on Rumble!
https://rumble.com/RonPaulLibertyReport
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you this week?
I'm doing fine, doing fine and dandy.
Go after the problems.
And we always seem to have a problem we can talk about, but we always have an answer too.
And I think that is important to know what the problem is.
But people who finally discover it and they play on it, and all they want to do is vary the problem.
Oh, I'm a better manager.
You know, they don't say get rid of the Fed.
They say, we know somebody else who can run the money system better.
So they always have an alternative to intervention.
Our approach is a little bit different.
If our foreign policy is failing overseas, it's not to send them more money and more troops and go bankrupt over it.
It's to change the policy.
And of course, we take a guide from the tradition of the Constitution, recognizing its shortcoming, but we certainly recognize where the Constitution is now.
Certainly the changes made in the last hundred years.
You know, it's been greatly diminished as an important instrument.
But there was an election, not in the U.S., this weekend, I guess, in Italy.
And the elections turned out not too badly.
They said, we're getting sick and tired of these guys.
The status quo is not what we want.
And somebody not too long ago wasn't well known, and all of a sudden, you know, it's moving in that direction.
But it's a message sent that the status quo actually is not satisfactory.
You can't go, I guess it was Reagan that made that big point.
You know, are you better off?
Well, he did that against Carter.
But a lot of people would, you know, if they've had a good four years, they'll say, look at what we did, look at what we did.
This isn't the case.
And this is the case, and maybe that's true in this country, too.
Even though if you listen to the ads already, they're not saying, well, we came up short.
What we need to do is we overspend.
Telling the truth is an absolute negative under today's conditions.
And even those who have the alternatives, sometimes they're fudging the figures too because it's pie-in-the-sky stuff.
You know, oh, yeah, I know what to do.
The whole problem was in this country is that Biden said the inflation is transitory.
This country is transitory is our problem.
And that's why we like to get to the bottom of it.
But there was this election.
I would say that there's a little bit of good news there.
It's a big deal.
I mean, this is a political earthquake.
And as we'll discuss later on in the show, this is not something that's a 100% victory for those of us against the bad guys.
But it is a big deal.
Italy is a big deal.
It's the second largest economy in Europe.
And it's easy to forget that.
But it's a big powerhouse country.
And they did a radical shift.
They elected a center-right, right-wing supermajority, it looks like, or close to it, over the weekend.
And let's put on that first clip because it's headed by the future prime minister is a Georgia Maloney, who's a great speaker, a great presence, the first woman prime minister in Italy's history, the first female prime minister.
Her party is the Brothers of Italy party.
And I've highlighted the part that's fascinating.
I think it explains some of her success.
Maloney's Brothers of Italy party, which won just 4% of the vote during the last national election in 2018, won the biggest share of the vote on Sunday's parliamentary elections, 22.5 to 26.5%.
So from 4% in 2018 to 25 or so percent now, just four years later.
That is a remarkable, remarkable shift.
And you would ask, well, what happened?
I mean, how can you justify such a huge shift in Italian politics?
Well, I think this next clip, this is from a Reuters article.
I think this might explain some of it, Dr. Paul.
Whereas her allies, Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi, joined forces with the center left last year to form a unity government under Mario Draghi, Maloney refused, saying appointing an unelected former central banker was undemocratic.
Now here's the part that I think is interesting.
That decision left the brothers of Italy as the sole major party in opposition, giving it a pass on having to defend unpopular decisions taken during the COVID emergency.
So staying out of that alliance with Draghi and his Goldman Sachs buddies gave them clean hands to say, we didn't support the COVID restriction.
And in Italy, as we've discussed, Dr. Paul, these restrictions, these lockdowns were horrific, among the worst in the world.
So she had clean hands, and I just can't help but thinking that that has some effect on the Italian voter.
You know, there's a famous quote, and I've used it, you know, an idea whose time has come can't be stopped by armies.
And that's been around.
And what I'm going to say is a variation of that, because it's not so much ideological, and yet it really is.
It's the rejection of the policies that they've had.
They were talking about policies.
And it looks like her popularity, that surge on this, I would say, you know, somebody's time has come.
And maybe it's the time that people wake up, time they're sick and tired of it, and time that the real enemy is being recognized.
And it wasn't stopped by the establishment.
That's why when we have a victory here over the mainstream media and all the propaganda and the FBI and everybody else, you know, it's really encouraging that ideas are powerful, even though there are times where I know and understand why people would be very frustrated.
If that's the case, how do the really bad guys get so much power?
And yet, most of them don't live long lives either when they're really, really bad people.
And so I see this as not just a fly in the sky.
Some guy gets up and says, you know, I'm going to be a better dictator than the other guys.
And all we need is to throw this party out and put this party in.
These people that voted this way knew exactly what was going on and they were sick and tired of it.
And that has already happened.
And we've mentioned it many times on this program, that people finally got sick and tired of the lockdowns.
And it's just totally ignored.
Like Biden says, it's all over.
There's no pandemic anymore.
Look, no mask out there.
So it's all a con game.
But this is good.
I'm delighted to hear this.
And I hope this has followed through.
And I have no idea because I don't know the politics of Italy.
And there has to be a few free market people there.
Yeah, and you know, the interesting thing, and you wrote about this this week too, ironically, the right wing in Italy owes a great debt of gratitude to their arch enemy, which is the European Commissioner.
And the interesting part is, and you point this out, she herself is unelected.
I'm talking about Ursula von der Leyen.
She is unelected.
Yet she threatened a couple of days before the election, she threatened the Italians, if you vote the wrong way, there's going to be consequences.
And we actually have a clip of her saying this.
If we can play that first audio clip, and I think we play the whole thing through.
It's about 20 seconds of good old Ursula.
If you can find that, put that up here.
I think we're.
Here we go.
Here's Ursula.
We'll see if things go in the particular direction.
Order.
We can play the whole clip.
Audio's not working.
Do you realize I get it?
We've got some audio problems.
It's low audio.
It doesn't matter.
That's her.
We don't have to put it back up.
She says, we'll see.
If things go in a difficult direction, and I've spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have the tools.
We have the tools.
So she's saying, because, you know, Hungary has bucked the European Union a couple of times.
They're not super keen on these sanctions.
Poland has done the same thing.
So she's basically saying, we have been able to smack down Hungary and Poland.
In Italy, if you misbehave and if you vote for the wrong people, the people that we won't allow you to vote for, we have tools.
We have ways of making you talk.
And I really do think, and you saw, after this happened, there were huge rallies in Italy.
We don't care what von der Leyen says.
We don't care what she says.
I think it gave them a boost in the end.
I think she gave them, they owe her a debt of gratitude.
Well, when a nation gets into trouble and it's being run by thugs and authoritarians, they can't say that they have a wonderful philosophy and we just need a couple more bucks.
That works for a while, but then it finally ends.
Then it has to become more violent.
It becomes violent with threat.
And then there are acts of violence.
And I was thinking of the tragic picture this weekend that the FBI is on a defensive and they need to be put on a lot more defensive.
But the family, the Catholic family, they're showing how they went in there because they disagreed with her.
And that means they are desperate because it doesn't even make good political sense.
It's really, you wonder what's going on because they're either really, really stupid or they're conniving for something else.
But it is so tragic how they're getting worse.
And that's going to happen more so.
The FBI gets more authoritarian, but governments do.
And that's what she was representing in Italy.
But if you vote in a way I do not approve, you will be punished.
People are getting punished in this country all the time.
Threatened.
The whole way they kept COVID restrictions on was intimidation.
There was still a powerful instinct for Americans, which in many ways is a positive thing.
They want law and order and they want to obey law, but then there's a limit, and how do you reach that limit?
And what do you do about it?
Martin Luther King had a good answer for this.
You have peaceful disobedience is when it gets to a certain point.
And so far, I think that right now it's getting more violent.
People, when they're losing power, power to them eventually is more important to them than money because most of the time they have, you know, the insiders have a lot of money.
So I don't think they, oh, if we get another billion dollars, we're going to be happy people.
But boy, do they love power and molding what the world is like, what the population should be.
Obedience is the most important thing that they do.
And that was a test run with the lockdown.
And it was worldwide.
They showed how powerful they are.
I was really impressed on how global that effort was because they never had proof of anything.
Science, were they on the side of science?
They said they were.
But I think the people are waking up and finding out, you know, you have to be careful now.
If you're a well-known politician in Washington, if you overstep your bound, you might get booed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We heard about that.
I think it's great that you make that connection between someone like von der Leyen, who is an authoritarian, and our authoritarians here at home, because just like von der Leyen is not elected, the deep state here, the FBI, and all the creeps that raid houses of people they don't like, they're also not elected.
So there's a good connection.
But the thing is, I don't want to get too, I don't think we should, A, it's really not our business what's happening in Italy, although we like the idea of throwing the bums out, but I don't think we should get too optimistic because the policies of the Brothers of Italy party, Maloney herself, are not as radical as you might think.
And here's from that same Reuters article.
And so I'll just put this up here as a cautionary tale, if we can put that next clip up.
She has reassured Italy's establishment, touting a strong pro-West message, vowing to boost defense spending and undertaking to stand up to Russia and China.
It will not be the usual spaghetti and mandolin Italy that fails to show up when history beckons.
So for all of that, and still we're happy that the status quo was voted out of office.
But she's in favor of sending weapons to Ukraine.
She's in favor of the sanctions, which have hurt Italy's economy very seriously.
So there's going to have to be a reckoning.
Maybe that was her campaign ploy.
But I mean, it's too early to get super excited beyond the fact that the bums were thrown out, and it may have some implications for our own elections here.
Your point is very important because it's easy to attack, and it's good to attack.
It's good to get rid of it.
But where the failure comes is they're usually going to replace it with just a modification and a pretense that it's something new and different.
But you have to be prepared for the replacement.
And I contend, you know, I deal with this all the time when people ask me, yeah, would you close down the Fed?
Well, it needs closed down, but you have to recognize some of the problems.
But you have to know, what are you going to do when you don't have a Federal Reserve?
I said, well, it's not that difficult.
Why don't you look at the country the first 150 years?
We didn't have a Federal Reserve.
So it's the replacement.
You know, how are the sick going to be taken care of?
How are they going to be fed?
All this stuff if you want to reduce the government, because they're always on a noble crusade.
And I imagine 90% of the people who went along in the early years on lockdown, it was a holy crusade.
And they were doing this for humanity's sake.
Bill Gates said that.
He's a humanitarian.
That's his whole life.
Isn't that amazing how he developed that perpetuation?
NATO's Political Quandary00:02:42
And when we look at what he really lies and believes.
Exactly.
Well, we're going to just briefly touch on the next one.
And that's what's happening in Ukraine and Russia.
I think we're three days into referendums being held in four provinces in eastern Ukraine with regard to joining Russia.
Now, the U.S. and its NATO allies have said we will not recognize these are sham votes to leave Ukraine and join Russia, although they sang a different tune when it was Kosovo because they approved of that breakup.
But nevertheless, what the implications of this are pretty serious, I think, because these four breakaway republics, and they're, by and large, Russian-speaking, 90% Russians, if they do vote to join Russia, that will mean that the borders, at least in terms of how Russia views things, have moved that much further in.
And they have made it pretty clear.
Medvedev, who the former president, who's now the Deputy Security Council head, said that we will consider this part of our border and they will get all the constitutional protections, including our strategic nuclear deterrence.
So it is kind of an escalation for sure to take these over and make it.
So the question is, what does the U.S. do?
What does NATO do?
Do we keep pumping in weapons?
Are we going to attack this new area, which Russia at least views as Russia?
That would mean a direct attack on Russian territory, at least according to how Russians view it, by NATO, by NATO forces, by NATO tanks.
The danger here, I think, cannot be understated.
Yeah, it's a mess now, and it's hard to extricate ourselves from this because we're involved.
We've been involved for a long time and we were part of the coup.
And we had talked enough about, you know, the coup of 2014 and how history is going to show that maybe we started this mess and this is a consequence.
But I've argued from the very beginning, and it sounded that I was being ambivalent on all this, but I just didn't have a good feeling on what Russia was doing because there's another rule that you're supposed to consider, and that's a proportional response to when you're attacked.
And right now it's getting out of proportion.
And now it's become personal.
Who's losing, who's winning, and when they were talking about Crimea, the case was a little clearer.
But now it's getting messy.
And it's something that I think is going to be very difficult to change.
But we have to know what caused it in order to prevent it.
And that was, I found out in a campaign that they don't want to hear the cause.
Understanding Causes00:06:45
What do you do if you're in politics and we're part of the problem?
You know, that leads to problems that you can't deal with because it becomes very political and they play on it.
But I always thought that if you tell the truth each time, eventually you might win some here and there.
But the battle is for purveying and pursuing truth rather than saying, am I going to be the king and dictator and have the most money?
And that's what it morphs into now.
And then the American people, who's getting stuck with the bills?
It's our American taxpayers, and I don't think they, I'd have to say there's a little bit of wisdom coming there.
The American people, you know, on occasion you hear the politicians saying, why are we sending the money to Ukraine when we still have so many problems here?
And that's a sort of a utilitarian argument, but it's a real one too, because every time you spend more money over there and print money, and somebody's going to suffer.
And that's why I think it's important to be reminded if they're unhappy with the cost of living increases, they better study a little bit more about economics.
And a little bit of history, too.
You know, it's interesting how we don't know history.
But of course, people that live in these areas, they know their history very well.
You know, in that part of Ukraine, Novorossiya, that was part of Russia until 1922 when Lenin, of all people, said, okay, we're going to make it part of Ukraine now.
And that was Soviet policy.
They always wanted to mix nationalities up because it made the state stronger because if you keep people bickering on a local level, then the central government is the referee.
And so it's only since 1922, and it was done by Lenin himself, of putting those together.
And of course, Crimea was in the 50s with Khrushchev.
And they all had that same sort of policy.
So what we're really seeing are the implications of the end of the Cold War even now and the breakup of the Soviet Union even that much later.
Well, let's move on.
I'm going to skip ahead a little bit a couple of clips that I have because, Dr. Paul, I've got sad news.
Someone has got COVID.
Let's put up that Thomas Massey tweet if we can.
I'm going to skip ahead a couple.
So I think, yeah, here we go.
So here's Albert Borla.
Dr. Paul, you know who he is.
He's the CEO of Pfizer.
He made an announcement on the 24th of September, I have tested positive for COVID.
I'm feeling well and symptom-free.
I've not had the new bivalent booster yet, as I was following CDC guidelines to wait three months since my previous COVID case.
So basically what's happened, the CEO of Pfizer, fully vaxed, fully boosted, fully shot, shot to the hilt.
He got COVID not once, but twice in 40 days.
twice in 40 days.
That is not a great sales pitch for his therapist.
But Daniel, I got to caution you.
You're not telling the whole story because they have another sentence.
They say, yes, but if I had not had those shots, I'd have gotten much sicker.
And I would be, I would, you know, but who knows who's going to be free from myocarditis.
You know, that's the sad part about it.
And there's a lot of young people that have suffered.
And you think of all these social batters, arguments have gone on, you know, with dealing with playing in sports.
And the few that have stood up against it, you know, like the tennis payer.
I mean, there were a few people that did on principle say, I'm not going to take it.
It's just so divorced from the idea that people make their own decisions.
And this is, you know, part of the strategy, too, that you are owned by the government.
And you have your medical care by the doctor.
You have your education by the doctors.
You can depend on the food and all your income is determined by the government because they assume every cent you make is theirs and they'll permit you to spend it on their terms.
So it's not quite the free society that our founders envision.
Well, let's skip ahead because we're going to look at the next one.
This is Borla himself.
This probably pretty much tells you everything you need.
And this is Dr. Eli David tweets about Borla.
He says, four times vaxed and double masked Pfizer CEO just tested positive for COVID for the second time in under three months.
Love the science will win slogan on his double mask.
There you have it.
And let's remind ourselves of Albert Borla, what he wrote back in April of 2021 about his wonderful shots.
Let's put that next one up.
Excited to share that updated analysis from our phase three study with BioNTech also showed that our COVID-19 vaccine was 100% effective in preventing COVID-19 cases in South Africa.
100%.
Fast forward to today, you get it twice, even though you had four shots.
That doesn't seem like a bargain.
Dr. Paul, you mentioned myocarditis.
We have a little clip from Tucker Carlson who talks about it.
It's tragic.
We don't really have time to deal with it in detail here.
But let's listen to, I think, 37 seconds of what Tucker had to say in his monologue on this issue.
So another topic that no one in the medical industry wants to talk about, and that's the COVID vaccine.
And in some people who received it, there appears to be serious heart damage, far more than the experts thought would occur.
The Lancet just surveyed young people ages 12 to 29 who suffered from myocarditis, heart damage, after taking the COVID shot.
According to the Lancet, 90 days after myocarditis symptoms emerged, roughly 26% of young people who surveyed still needed daily medication because their hearts were so damaged.
20% said they had problems with their daily activities.
30% said they experienced pain.
How will they be at age 60, you wonder?
And of course, you know the answer.
Hospitals were perfectly aware.
Pretty scary stuff, Dr. Paul.
Oh, it is.
Pretty scary.
And the evidence is not clear on what's going to happen in various other fields like infertility and the problems there.
And that's going to be around for a long time, and they're going to be trying to try and sort it out.
And they probably created a monster of a medical scientific problem.
Having science sort out all the unscientific things they said and did is a job and a half.
But that is sad.
It's just further proof that the authoritarian system where you lose the doctor-patient relationship, where you lose our ability to mind our own business in a personal way, in an economic way, or in an international way.
And I just say, we who believe this, and our numbers, I believe, are growing.
Authoritarianism's Unscientific Legacy00:02:15
We have to get really better at presenting our viewpoints because they're so, well, they're excellent.
You know, they're superior at least to everything else because man is imperfect.
That's not going to work out exactly.
But we can be pretty certain that the statistics shows that the people who desire power and will do anything to have it, Lychee and Steele, and you know, they have a greater motivation to have some position in government at all levels of government.
And even though George Soros has never been elected to anything, he has some clout that has proven to be very powerful, especially the people who are influencing the rules under COVID.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, and let's put up that last clip.
New week, new reminder.
Let's go to the next one, actually.
We're going to skip that and move ahead to that final clip.
Big conference, Lake Jackson shut up, cancel culture and the war on speech.
Dr. Paul will be speaking.
Jeff Dice from the Mises Institute will be speaking.
Del Bigtree will be speaking.
Himself canceled over his views on the same doctor-patient relationship that you mentioned.
It's about cancel culture.
We've got other speakers we're going to announce.
It's going to be a great, really fun conference down here in Lake Jackson.
So get your tickets, go to ronpaulinstitute.org and click on that picture, or I will put a link also in the description.
And we look forward to seeing you in just over a month's time.
Very good.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
We're looking forward to our next conference.
They give me a boost because I get to meet people who are really in the trenches and trying to spread the word.
But I think every one of us has a responsibility.
And we don't even know exactly what that is.
Just look for the opportunity.
People will use you in certain ways to promote an idea, which is the most important thing.
And that is the difference between a free society and an authoritarian society.
Authoritarianism cancels out the individual.
And that's exactly what we don't need.
We need a system of government that emphasizes the true diversity of individuals running their own lives.