GOP Leader: Ukraine Gravy Train To End If Republicans Re-Take House
As several major polls show Americans are shifting dramatically away from supporting Ukraine, GOP House Leader Kevin McCarthy has said that shoveling yet more money to Kiev will not be automatic should control of the House shift after the November elections. This as many Republican up-and-coming candidates are running explicitly on shutting down the money spigot to Europe's most corrupt country. Also today: why are so many retired senior US military officers bathing in Saudi cash? Finally: US Senate opens the money spigot to Taiwan even wider.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McGabbs, our co-host.
Happy Wednesday, Dr. Paul.
How are you today?
I'm doing fine at the end.
Did you get your trash out?
Oh, I don't know.
I just burned it.
Don't say that.
It was cold this morning.
Yeah, that was true.
I can remember the days when I was, you know, when Pittsburgh was a dirty city, they were making all that steel to fight the world.
And so it was in the air up until noontime.
And then every time I had to fire up the furnace when winter came, you know, today I turned the switch up a little bit.
Did you?
And we had to go down and shovel the coal into our furnace.
But it was a good heater.
Anyway, I want to talk about a little bit about Ukraine and all the lobbying going on, all the money spent, and how's it fitting in into the election.
And we want to know about how Zelensky's responding to this, because if the people lose interest in it, the people who are paying the bills, that is the American citizen, if they lose interest and think that we should be more concerned about home issues, Zelensky's not going to have enough to do.
I mean, he's a high-paid lobbyist because I think he probably takes a little bit of living expenses.
He's been pretty successful.
I doubt if we went there and tried to lobby for $67 billion, we wouldn't do so well.
That's what we need for the show.
The only way they could do is maybe, well, they'd either cancel us or give us money to just be quiet.
But anyway, it's a big thing in the news, and it's in some ways, although not way out on the table, I think it's playing a role in what's going on in the campaign here, which represents the two issues, moral bankruptcy and financial bankruptcies.
And that's why the people are restless in a political philosophy that's been prevailing in our government here for the last several years.
It is a time that we live in that I think the prognosticators aren't going to be real good at knowing exactly what will come out.
And that's good.
That's good because that means that people, that might mean that the people who are switching their votes, they can't quite make a broadcast out.
They might not answer the polling questions, and it messes up their polling.
But anyway, Zelensky has a bit of a problem if we and the rest of the world become a little lukewarm about his problems that he has over there.
But, you know, we might not express tremendous sympathy or as much sympathy for Zelensky as other people do.
But I think that we should be honing in on NATO.
You know, If NATO didn't exist, we would have never heard of Zelonski.
Let me tell you.
I mean, he's our stoo.
It has nothing to do with freedom and tyranny.
It has something to do with tyranny, but they're not too worried about freedom.
Yeah.
Well, let's put up that first clip because this is an article that we noticed in Unheard.
And it kind of trails with some other things that we've been looking at this morning.
Well, America and Zelensky's Dream.
This is Thomas Faze wrote this.
The pro-war consensus seems to be weakening.
It's a very good article that we recommend reading.
And through that second clip, this is from the article.
This is how he opens the article.
No, no, go back if you can.
That's not the right one.
Anyway, what he talks about in the article is how much the establishment now, the establishment figures, and he cites, he cites David Ignatius, he cites the Washington Post, he cites Josh Hammer with a piece in Newsweek.
He cites David Sanger, very pro-war traditionally.
Elon Musk, who's not necessarily pro-war, but essentially, these are all the figures of the establishment who are now changing their turnout.
They're not going turning anti-war.
And a lot of them, I think, are disingenuous.
They see that the ship is sinking, I think, and they're ready to abandon ship.
But what's happening, if we can, yeah, so what's happening is the establishment is shifting on this.
And that's, I think, a big deal.
And I think he's mentioning that.
And I think that's also being reflected in the Republican leadership.
Now, if we can put that clip on, our clips got messed up a little bit this morning.
I don't know what's going on.
Our internet was messed up.
But the picture of McCarthy on there, if you can put up, here we go.
And this is something else I think that ties into the same thing.
GOP will likely oppose more aid if Republicans win house back McCarthy.
And with Kevin McCarthy, that's about as anti-war as he could possibly get.
We might oppose the A.
But a shift is happening, I think.
And, you know, Tulsi sort of is involved in this because she's a public figure.
She's well liked.
She made a major decision.
And the decision actually was around this whole issue about why we're over in Ukraine spending all this money.
And she didn't look like the person to pick on right now.
And I think that was beneficial that she added a little fuel to the fire.
And I think right now, though, that there's more and more people waking up to what's happening.
And if the Republicans win back the House, I don't know.
It'll be beneficial.
I sure hope they're right.
It isn't the issue that comes up at every town hall meeting.
It has, though, to some degrees, people will, when they're in a tight race, they might say, look, why are we spending all that money on the borders in Ukraine and not dealing with some of these problems at home?
But that's an overall position to take.
When you run an empire, the end of an empire comes when people who run the empire forget about the people who are paying for it, and there's finally a rebellion against it.
And it doesn't have to be a violent rebellion.
And I think people are starting to oppose the war.
And when Washington Post allows some of this stuff, you know, a year ago, they probably wouldn't have even seen it in the Washington Post saying that there's a bit of a problem and maybe we've overdone it in Ukraine.
And in a way, maybe this is silly, but it sort of feels like those two years with COVID.
You know, from the very beginning, you were saying, we were saying on the show, this is a bad idea.
Everything you're doing is wrong.
It's really stupid policy.
It's going to be a disaster.
And we were, of course, I don't know if you can get that one with all the charts and all the numbers on it, if you can put that up.
But I think this is actually interesting.
And you're right, it's probably more nuanced.
Actually, you know, the one that's just the numbers, and that's okay.
So the point is that, according to this new New York Times poll, only 2% believe that the Ukraine situation is the most important thing we need to face.
Whopping, whopping majority of them believe the economy is the issue.
So with Democrats running on Ukraine as the issue and only 2% of the Americans that concerned about it, it's a problem coming up.
This is very significant, but it might not be as wonderful as we want it to be.
Yeah.
It's not that 98% of the people said, we've had enough.
It's spending too much.
We shouldn't be there.
We should end the empire.
We should balance our budget.
And this is where we should start.
We should take care of it.
I don't think it's there.
I think it's a lot of apathy.
They're tired of it.
And you mentioned, you know, the COVID war.
People finally got tired of it and didn't believe it.
So now they're not believing this story either.
So, no, I think it's all good news.
Their motivations will never be fully known, the motivations of each and every voter.
But right now, it probably, the 2% listing this is probably another reflection.
I would say that the Democrats would look at this as very negative for them because what they're saying, you know, they wouldn't do this if, you know, it took a long time to do that in the 60s to get our street demonstrations on.
People were so apathetic with this, which is in a way good, that people still don't, they're hearing too much about the problems we have, and they haven't even looked at the map yet and say, oh, I know where Ukraine is, that pipeline.
Well, I'm worried about closing on pipelines here in the United States, which is a pretty good choice.
Well, here's a couple of things from the Zero Hedge article.
Just a couple of quotes.
And I think we can take some courage in this because we've been talking for a while about how there's kind of a new crop of Republicans that are leaning against war.
I wouldn't say anti-war, but leaning in a better direction.
And here's from the article.
I'll just read a couple of clips because I can't put them up.
Notwithstanding GFP Warhawks like Mitch McConnell, McCarthy isn't the only Republican who's publicly opposed to more Ukraine aid.
This is a quote, I do think that we have to get to a point, and this is where we do disagree, we've got to stop the money spigot to Ukraine eventually, said JD Vance, who's running for Senate in Ohio.
And then we have from the same article, meanwhile, Arizona Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters said in May that the money would be better spent securing the southern border.
Quote, under Joe Biden, it's always America last, he said.
Let's be clear about what this means.
It means no ceasefire.
It means another foreign war will be paid for everything.
Many more thousands will die.
There's no resolution, no end in sight.
The risk, of course, is that a proxy war can escalate to an all-out nuclear war between nuclear powers.
And now up in New Hampshire, Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduk said last week that more spending is not the answer.
He said, quote, we must hold the administration accountable.
We can't spend more money.
The answer is not spending more money in Ukraine.
And here's this another one.
Republican Senate nominee Adam Laxalt from Nevada, son of a famous senator there.
He tweeted in May that the $40 billion to Ukraine was, quote, shockingly abhorrent proposal, which seems to be something that the new breed of Republicans are agreeing on.
And then you look at the old guard, people like Adam Kinzinger, and he said, and for once he may be right, Dr. Paul, I just see a freight train coming, and that is Trump and his operation turning against aid for Ukraine.
He's having a panic attack over it, while the rest of America increasingly is saying, wow, that's a good idea.
It's popular now for the politicians to say, well, we have to balance the budget and quit the spending and do all these things.
But they don't work on connecting the spending and the deficits with the grocery bills.
And they're not too worried.
But right now, though, this would be so easy to start whittling away.
But it would be easy for us to just strike it and bring them home and stay out of these affairs.
But even if you had to start modestly reducing the budget and have a net reduction, which is not on the horizon, they could start cutting this, and we wouldn't be less safe.
We'd be more safe.
We wouldn't have to be threatened and putting on sanctions.
And here they're talking about sending more money to Taiwan and all this kind of stuff.
So they're always doing this.
And it's so much better.
But it also offers an opportunity for it's not a compromise, but it's an in-between position.
They say, you know, if they have a big budget and it's $10 billion, cut 10% of it.
Yeah.
You know, and take it from these places that the American people wouldn't know about.
And you could start cutting that back.
But, of course, we could withstand the whole fact that we just changed our policy.
You know, it could be like an adjustment we had in 1920 when they dealt with the depression.
Then, if we just dealt with this pressure on the American taxpayer and the hawks to keep spending and being there and adding and never quitting, we could do it if we cut.
You know, the real truth is, if we cut our aggressiveness in the budget, in the military, by 50% in one year, I bet we would survive.
I bet we would survive it and probably thrive in it.
Maybe we'd have a real tax reduction and we wouldn't be printing so much money.
But they've been locked in on this militant foreign policy.
So this good news that we're referring to, hopefully good news, will represent a change in attitude in the foreign policy.
So people would say, that's right, that's right.
Why are we over there defending the borders of Ukraine at the same time?
We have a problem over here.
Yeah.
And this Pew Poll that we mentioned, one of the interesting things is now a plurality of Republicans and leading Republicans believe that we are providing too much aid.
That's 32 up from 9% in March.
And that's very, very significant.
You know, Dr. Paul, it used to be once the idea that this domino theory, it was so discredited, the idea if we don't fight in Vietnam, we're all going to just turn commie.
That was so discredited that it was a laughing stock.
But now we have to revisit that.
And of course, the left was very good back then in ridiculing the idea that there was a domino theory.
But now they're embracing, if we let Putin take the eastern part of Ukraine, he's going to take New York next week.
And it's absurd.
It's even more absurd now than it was during the Cold War.
But somehow this is sort of back from the dead.
That's right.
The big obstacle to all this is there's a lot of people still very much in control in the propaganda.
Generals and Propaganda00:09:46
You know, the politicians who are still there that are the hawks and those friends that used to be your neighbors, the military-industrial complex.
You knew where they lived.
They lived well.
But they're the ones who know the system pretty well.
And they sort of escape in many ways, most of the time they escape the inside battles to become Republican and Democrats.
They're not partisan people.
They're money people and they're weapons people.
And so that is going to be there, but it should be addressed.
It will eventually be addressed when the big bankruptcy is hit.
And we're moving in that direction and waking up some people.
But that has to happen too, because that means undermining and changing an attitude that started 100 plus years ago.
You know, the foreign policy that fits into foreign aggression and Woodrow Wilson's idea, make the world safe for democracy.
Well, that's not even a very good idea to begin with, let alone the amount of money they spend, and it doesn't work.
Yeah.
Well, I want to take a second to thank Brewster McBrewster and Gypsy Magic for chipping in on our Rumble rants.
We appreciate the support.
But you talk about corruption, and that is a perfect segue to our next segment.
And I don't know if we can even do this.
I hesitate to even say, but if you can find the picture of General Jones and put that clip up, his mug is right there in the front.
If you can sift through there to find that.
Because this is something that's come out.
It's a Washington Post investigation that Coleman James wrote about.
We noticed it on Zero Hedge.
Defying Pentagon Secrecy report exposes retired U.S. generals on the payroll.
And it's not just generals.
If you can back up one, and this is from the article, in total, the Post found that more than 500 retired U.S. military personnel, including scores of generals and admirals, have taken lucrative jobs since 2014 working for foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia, Libya, Turkey, and Kuwait, mostly with the official approval of the U.S. military.
So what's happening is that they are retiring with a huge pension, a pension that we could only dream about, and they're going on and doubling down and hiring on with Saudi Arabia secretly to double, triple, or quadruple their salary.
What are they doing there?
That's a good question.
You know, this used to not occur.
It was not legal.
Then they made it legal, but you had to get permission, and that's just a rubber stamp, and they get their permission.
And then after they got permission to do it, then they insisted be secret.
So it was held secret.
There was a lot of know who was in which country.
But, you know, it raises more questions and it settles why are they there?
Is it only the money they're going to make out of it?
But it looks like I just really believe, oh, this might be risky.
I really believe that these people don't go over there and they talk about secrecy.
I believe the CIA knows exactly who goes over there.
And it's either putting information there or gathering information.
So it's such a terrible way to run a foreign policy, but it's involved there.
But it's just an extension.
You know, we were inviting people to think that maybe we're moving a little bit away from sending all this money to Ukraine.
But this is just the extension that not many people think about of the military-industrial complex.
You know, they do it and they participate and they become experts and then they become an expert in the lobbyists for it.
I imagine the biggest motivation of some of this stuff is the military people know how to help arms manufacturers selling weapons.
And it's, of course, I think this week they said that, oh, I think it was Taiwan.
They were able to spend their money as they choose.
Because all the money isn't.
It goes like the point you frequently make.
It goes to the arms manufacturer or it goes to a university to propagate this propaganda.
So that's a big problem, but I think the only thing we can do is help explain it and get people to the point where the answer, tinkering is okay.
If you're moving in the right direction, a little bit is better than nothing.
But the whole thing is, if you need to change it, you have to change the policy and you have to change the attitude.
And that's what when we see some of this, it looks like the attitude is changing and attitudes make a difference.
And the point I frequently have made is when the attitude started changing with COVID, you know, things softened up for the American people.
And yet we still know, like yesterday, we talked about the more they're still planning on more vaccines for little kids.
So it's an endless fight.
There's always going to be people out there that are anti-liberty and they're going to be pro-nihilistic.
You can't know the truth anyway.
So we can do whatever we want.
The thing about this that's troubling, okay, we don't know what they're doing for Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, et cetera.
But the thing is, Americans do have the sense that generals and admirals and high-ranking officers, they're figures of authority and they're presented as such when they're on the media.
So the question I would have is how many of these generals who are literally being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Saudi Arabia or another country such as that will go on to television as authority figures, as military experts, and not reveal when they comment on some of these things that they're actually being paid to do it.
Now we see a lot of General Keene.
He's on Fox News all the time.
He's their expert.
He's the most pro-war, war-blustering fool there is out there.
What's never revealed when he and so many others like him go on television is the fact that he's literally on the board and getting paid by military contractors.
So we need to have this kind of fool disclosure.
I think it's unseemly.
If you retire, it's not for me to tell people what they should earn, but if you retire on a $200,000 government salary after a career in the military, maybe you should just kind of chill out and not think you want to make a million off of it.
It's amazing how they can maintain their arrogance.
You know, Zelensky is still, he's almost like, hey, send me my check.
This month I made this much money.
And so often he has, up until now, he has gotten it.
The other thing is, is they're getting 70%.
Saudi Arabia receives around 70% of their weaponry.
And they get other things too.
But for logistical support, so they keep doing this.
And you get to thinking, well, why do we do this?
Okay, you know, a lot of people are mad at Saudi Arabia.
They're getting to be our enemies.
They're talking to the Russians.
And yet, even in the 70s, they boycotted oil and helped exacerbate the problems we have.
And right now, they're doing this and threatening to do this.
And their attitude, we don't care about you.
And they're totally dependent on us to do this.
I would say the principle of foreign aid and intervention and clowning around like that is not worth anything to us.
And we ought to let the market dictate prices and then let somebody else make a decision, not the politicians who are wheeling and dealing with their lobbyists.
And speaking of sending money overseas, if we can load up that one Senate looks to give Taiwan $10 billion in military aid, this is from anti-war.com.
Also, I think it was on Zero Hedge.
Dave DeCamp wrote this.
The Senate's version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act will include $10 billion in military aid for Taiwan.
And I think, unfortunately, Dr. Paul, this is the downside for a lot of Republicans who might be with us on Ukraine about not spending money on this dangerous thing.
They say, yeah, we should be spending it against China.
Not all of them, and hopefully none of the ones we read feel that way.
But there is that sense.
But we can put on one right after that.
And this is from the article.
And it says everything you need to know about Washington, how they view our money.
The $10 billion that we're sending to Taiwan is a massive increase from the $4.5 billion initially proposed by Senator Menendez and Lindsey Graham.
So the two biggest hawks in the Senate, Graham and Menendez, they wanted to give $4.5 billion.
And the rest of the Senate said, are you kidding?
They need $10 billion to buy weapons.
Just provoking China.
Well, Lindsey Graham is a Republican, so he'll protect the Constitution and Republican spending.
And the Republican, you know, on a balanced budget.
So he's going to protect the interests of the conservatives, sure.
But he's not bashful about it.
And unfortunately, when it comes to these issues, there's no difference.
Haiti's Ongoing Struggle00:03:58
And that's why it marches on.
But that doesn't mean that we are going to back off and say, well, we've lost the fight because unfortunately, we win.
Even if it continues the way it is, we still win because it ends in a way that's much more disastrous because it ends with a bankruptcy, which means runaway inflation.
And the debt gets wiped out.
Debt has to be wiped out.
And it's happening all the time.
The president just the other day wiped out all student debt.
No problem at all.
So that debt will be wiped out and it will be difficult to do this.
And yet on the long run, we win the fight, but then it becomes very dangerous because they've been undermining our liberties continuously in the last few years.
And they continue to do that.
And if you go to the point where there's violence and a breakdown of law, oh, we've already had a breakdown of law and order.
What's going to replace it?
That is a big question, too.
So I think the goal and the move toward and the understanding of moving toward peace and prosperity is not complicated.
It's about one or two rules you follow.
Mind your own business and don't steal or hurt people.
You know, and the world would be better off.
A lot better off.
Well, I'm going to close out, and I do apologize to our viewers for mixing up the clips.
We had an internet thing, and it juggled them all around.
It would have been interesting to do them in the order we had them.
It would have been insane.
But put up that last one again, just as a reminder for our conference on November 5th.
It's coming up very fast, Dr. Paul.
At this point in the wait, I always get nervous.
I'm not ready for this.
I'm not ready for this.
But we're looking forward to welcoming all of our friends down here at Lake Jackson.
It's been a nice day today.
I think we're going to have nice weather then.
So get your tickets.
Go to ronpaultinstitute.org.
You'll see this ugly picture, I have to say, but this is an ugly idea, the idea of suppressing speech.
Cancel culture and the war on speech.
Get your tickets and come see us.
And Dr. Paul, we're going to do our best to maybe go on locals tomorrow and have a little chat.
So hang tight.
We'll announce it tomorrow if we get everything worked out.
But thanks so much for watching the show.
We appreciate it.
And I too want to thank our viewers for tuning in and thank you for your support.
I want to close with a real brief comment because in spite of our effort to come up with a positive analysis of what's happening with Ukraine, we know exactly what's really happening and we have to be cautious, but we still have to know what our goal is because you can't move toward the goal if you don't know where it is.
And we want to help making sure people know that goal.
But there's news today that shows that when we get closer to home, it gets maybe probably a little more difficult dealing with this.
And sometimes they ignore the things that they really should.
They ignore our borders.
But the U.S. and Canada now want to send armored vehicles to Haiti because they're having internal problems there.
And I'm sure there's lots of reason to be sympathetic.
We know people who act as missionaries.
They go to Haiti and try their best to help out.
And yet the problems continue.
But to just send more military aid there is not the answer.
We need more ideas sent there on why people are poor and in poverty all this time.
But so at the one time we may be backing off, and then I got to thinking about Haiti.
I wonder when the very first time was that we did get involved in the internal affairs of Haiti.
It's probably been around a long time.
It's not a threat to us in a way directly, but it still was a threat in principle that it participates in a policy that doesn't make it much sense.