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Nov. 8, 2022 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
32:52
Will Republicans Have The Courage To End Welfare For Ukraine?

With polls suggesting a Republican victory in the House and Senate today, the mother of all battles seems to be brewing between old-guard Republican leadership which favors endless money for Ukraine and a populist/conservative wave that is increasingly skeptical. GOP voters are trending strongly away from Ukraine support. Who will win? Also today: what to think while voting, and finally...a new US base in Syria!

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Political Empires Collide 00:14:02
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.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Election Day today.
Oh, anxiously waiting.
You know, you and I were just mentioning that, you know, the vote counting might get pretty complex.
You know, it could be a lot worse than anybody anticipated.
Everybody knows there's going to be watchers all over.
But, you know, in the electronic age, I keep thinking of electronic sabotage.
You know, even the preliminary reports, it's not like just one group in one place.
It's starting to add up.
And all they have to do is destroy the confidence in it and come up with some real wild thing.
Like the Democrats won by 30% every election in Arizona.
And then who knows what will happen.
This hope is not that bad because that would make it a non-election.
Yeah, I mean, cheating is one thing, but what we're seeing here is massive incompetence.
Why can we not just simply give people ballots, have them vote, count the votes, and declare the winner?
They're saying that it could be days, it could be weeks.
I think Fetterman up there in Pennsylvania said, well, I may start out slow, but I'll have a good ending in a few weeks.
I mean, why are these people so seemingly incompetent is the question.
You know, there should be reassurance or theoretical reassurance that with the electronics, that you'd be able to do it.
It'll be faster than all this manual and slick and you'd have control of it.
But all of a sudden, you know, get to the point where when you think of all our national security abilities with all the instruments they have, you know, the technology that's beneficial also can be the biggest enemy.
And that's why, you know, just plain old, here's your ballot, vote, we'll count it, and go on.
But, well, we will soon find out.
But in the meantime, we'll talk about something in the real world and try to influence people toward a peaceful society.
And this is the first one we have come up, comes from a responsible space statecraft.
And I think that's the Quincy Institute.
They're making an effort.
But the title of the article is, Are Republicans Really Poised to Put Brakes on Ukraine Aid?
Something that has been of interest to us because we're questioning that.
And if history repeats itself, there will be questions about the people who are enthusiastic for certain things.
Will they be able to carry through or whether they really want to carry through?
And I think that is a big question that will be answered because who knows what will happen in the Republican Party.
We see the Democrats are fussing and fuming over aid and their progressive caucus has just disintegrated, which proves our point that the military-industrial complex is pretty darn powerful.
But even the Republicans, you know, we have had statements by McCarthy that sound, wow, you know, maybe the Republicans will wake up and fill in the void that the Democrats have Created by becoming war hawks.
But I do think, though, that what appears to be happening may change.
Of course, we just mentioned may change in what the election turns out to be, but may change.
And it may be that the real contest is no longer with the progressives anymore.
The progressives have caved.
And there have been some Republicans have been pretty strong coming out.
And even though Trump is sort of a stiffer position, he's also given them an incentive to say that, you know, the American First Movement means that we shouldn't be sacrificing life and limb and money to people around the world and actually not accomplishing a whole lot.
And that's the worst part about it.
Empires are terrible, terrible to manage.
They're not sensible.
And yeah, once they get started, the only thing that holds them together is the bigger lies that you can tell.
So we hear lies and distortions all over about exactly the needs, the pressing needs for us to keep sacrificing to solve the problems and the borders of Ukraine and Russia, and then the world will be okay.
And the American people right now are challenging that presumption.
Yeah, and the piece we're talking about is written by Jim Anto, and it brings out some of the things that we've been talking about for the past couple of weeks.
But I do think, especially on Election Day, it's worth looking into again.
And the subtitle of his is A Serious Split on Foreign Policy in the Party on the Eve of the Midterms, shows that the issue was far from decided.
And we're seeing now the old guard, people like McCarthy, people like McConnell in the Senate, and all of the old guard Republicans are still walking with their blinders on toward oblivion with this endless foreign aid.
And you have this new breed, and we've talked about it before, who are looking at what we're doing and saying, as McCarthy did say, but I think you're going to tell us in a minute, and I know you're right, it was all politics.
But he did say, well, we don't have a blank check.
Well, there's a lot of things between cutting off aid and a blank check, right?
And the fact is, we're $31 trillion in debt.
We cannot afford to adopt this country forever and pay everything that they need forever.
But so that I think the thing is, if the Republicans do happen to take the House and Senate, one or the other or both, there is going to be a civil war within the party.
We've already seen what the Democrats do, how they can whip their people into shape with what happened to, as you say, to the progressives when they tried to write this letter.
But in the House, it's going to be a little bit more brutal and bloody.
And I think that's probably a good thing.
This has to happen.
You know, as they said in the Godfather, sometimes you have to go to the mattresses.
But let's put up the next clip because this is what we're talking about.
This is from Jim's piece.
And this is McConnell.
This is said right after McCarthy said we cannot have a blank check.
He said, Russia continues escalating attacks on Ukraine's civilians and energy infrastructure.
Right, okay.
And then he said, it's in America's core national security interest to make it clear that revisionist states such as Russia or China cannot simply gobble up smaller neighbors.
So he's obviously all in for continuing, for continuing the blank check essentially to Ukraine.
And here's one more, and I'm going to toss it back to you, Dr. Paul, but here's one more quote from the article.
And this shows that McConnell, for all of his, he seems to have good political sense because he's been able to hold on power for a long time.
But here's something from the article.
The Wall Street Journal poll finds that the share of GOP voters who think we're doing too much for Ukraine has exploded from 6% in March to 48% today.
Clearly, the trends among Republicans are going very, very strongly against continuing this aid.
Well, you know, the way I see this is there's a need for a change in our attitude in our foreign policy for a lot of reasons.
It doesn't make good sense.
It's not constitutional, all those reasons.
But it's also how are we paying for it and what are we going to do?
And we see the political thing.
You just quoted them.
The political dissent.
Now, Republicans, more Republicans are starting to make sense with what they're saying.
And even for political reasons, they have to speak out that they're not going to have this war going on forever and ever.
After about 50 years of it, people get pretty tired of it.
And so the transition to where we are, maintaining an empire to something more sensible is very, very difficult.
It's easy to say, and I say it all the time, just bring the troops home.
But there's too many special interests and they run into roadblocks.
But, you know, in a similar way, something happened after the Civil War.
In 1875, they had been off the gold standard for a long time, and they realized they had to go back to the gold standard.
And back then, the conditions were different.
There was a need for it.
They had abused it.
They were using greenbacks.
So the transition wasn't like, you know, real simple, but a lot easier than it would be today.
So what they did was they had a three-year period of transition, and lo and behold, they shrunk the money supply.
They got rid of the greenbacks.
And the eventual event of conversion, after three years, went smoothly.
But if you tried that same thing in foreign policy, maybe back then the foreign policy was even different then.
We didn't have perpetual war and empires to defend back in the 1870s.
We were working on it.
We weren't there.
But now we have so many things involved that people ask, well, why don't we do what they did in 1875?
Because it's too complex.
People can't, how can they keep printing money?
They're too dependent on it.
They're all addicted to it.
So in a practical sense, it won't work.
So it has to go to a collision, an economic collision under today's circumstances.
But I'm afraid if you applied that to foreign policy, you have to not think that six more people or 12 more people, not that I'm against it because I want them there talking about peace and what has to be done because there will be an opportunity.
But it's not going to be right after this election, all of a sudden, that we will be able to even move in that direction.
There's so many people.
So it won't be as simple as going back to the gold standard back in the 1870s.
And right now, it's not going to be simple to go back to a foreign policy which was understood by the founders of this country.
That's a long time ago.
And we've whittled away at even the concept of a non-intervention or mind our own business.
And the whispers of it and the hints of it, let's just deal with America first, which generates mixed emotions.
I mean, non-intervention is what I like because that's where we have to move.
But it will not be with a snap of the fingers.
It won't be as easy.
And that's why we're going to keep marching.
And guess what I think will do it?
It's going to come.
And that'll be the fact that we won't be able to afford it.
And when you can't afford it, it happens with all the empires.
And our empires are being, our empire has the days numbered for it because we can't afford to do what we're doing.
And I think Americans understand that.
And that's why the economy was the number one issue in this election.
People's interest in Ukraine has tanked.
But, you know, the battle lines are drawn.
And we can put on this next clip because Senator Josh Hawley has announced that he will not support Mitch McConnell for Senate majority leader.
That's a bold statement.
He's a bold senator.
We don't always agree with every one of his positions, but he certainly has the guts to speak his mind.
And here's what he said when he was asked about it: whether he would support McConnell.
I don't imagine I will.
No.
I'm not sure if any other senator will run or not.
Nobody's indicated they would.
But my view is that we need new leadership in that position.
Now, you might say, is he ambitious?
What's going on?
What's the issue?
Well, he's very clear about the problem.
And put on this next clip.
He's very clear about what's annoying him.
Hawley ticked off a list of decisions over the last two years he disagreed with.
Ukraine funding, that's number one he lists.
Ukraine funding, infrastructure and public safety bills, campaign spending in Arizona and New Hampshire.
I did not agree with the idea that you go out there and badmouth your own candidates in the middle of an election.
That's another issue that's really not something that we want to deal with.
But he did issue that as a top issue.
We have people coming in who are also very skeptical about this seeming open-ended commitment to Ukraine.
So I think it'll be very interesting to see what happens if we see this.
Well, I think the political structure is shifting because the progressives, I've sort of dismissed them as being instrumental in leading the peace movement.
I mean, they were very significant in trying to get the war stopped in the 1960s, and it took a lot of lives to do that.
But I think it's totally shifted, and it's shifted to this battle in the Republican Party.
And there may be some elections, you know, by the senators, their leadership, and, you know, leadership in the senator might make a difference.
But I think what we witnessed just in the last week or so is the power of the military-industrial complex.
For them to be, it wasn't like, oh, you know, after a month or two, they, you know, got the message from their supporters and their funders, the people who fund them.
Well, but maybe we ought to backtrack.
What was it, 24 hours?
Yeah.
Well, boy, we got the message from the deep state, and we don't want to be, you know, what.
So they switched immediately, and that'll still exist, even if the debate shifts more to the Republican Party.
You know, politically speaking, and militarism is a pretty bipartisan issue in the worst sort of way.
Food Security Crisis 00:14:51
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Dr. Paul, let's move on in our own show to something that you noticed this morning, and I hadn't seen it, but you noticed it.
And it was something that appeared on the Libertarian Institute.
And, you know, election days are a good time to reflect as well as to get out and vote.
And let's put on the next clip if we can.
This is from the Libertarian Institute, Remembering Daniel Webster this Election Day.
Yes, this caught my attention also because of the short introduction of paragraph, it brought up some interesting subjects.
This is from the Libertarian Institute and Scar Horton's group, but it's written by Dan McKnight.
And the title is Remembering Daniel Webster This Election Day.
And what really caught my attention, they talked about the dedication of Daniel Webster to a cause that's dear to our heart, and that is peace.
And he actually ran in the Senate when he wanted to make the point.
And I don't even know whether it helped him politically on that particular election, but he sort of started the Peace Party, called himself the Peace Party, but he wanted that message told.
And that, I think, was an opportunity for the people at the Libertarian Institute to make this point that this is a big subject.
And it's not like we need to be told that, but we love it when the people do this.
And Scott certainly has been a friend over the years and promoting what we're doing.
So I was very pleased to read this article.
Yeah, let's put up that next quote.
And this is just something from the article.
He says, tomorrow's election day, obviously, this came out yesterday.
So today is Election Day.
And he talks about, as you say, Dr. Paul, they write about they also want to run as a peace party.
Webster campaigned in 1814 while the nation was at war.
He thought the war was senseless.
He campaigned for peace for the Peace Party.
And it really is something that we need to think about when we vote.
And let's look at this next clip, because this is, again, from the article.
And it's a quote from Daniel Webster.
175 years ago, Daniel Webster addressed veterans like us directly.
He said, and this is a quote from Webster, I honor those who are called on by professional duty to bear arms in their country's name, in their country's cause, and to do their duty well.
I would obscure none of their fame.
But I will say here, and to them, there is the solemn adjudication of nations, and it is the sentiment of the Christian world that a war waged for vicious purposes or from vicious motives tarnishes the luster of arms and darkens, if it does not blot, what otherwise might be a glorious page in the history of the nation that makes it.
Very well said.
Yes, and I want to read a quote from the article.
He says, odds are, you've heard me quote my quote from Webster before, and he goes on to say, quote, it will be the solemn duty of the state governments to protect their own authority over their own militia and to interpose between their citizens and the arbitrary power by the federal government.
Sounds like a modern-day debate going on.
Of course, I think the whole thing about the state National Guards and all this, I think the whole principle of the militia has long been lost.
But the advice to him was that he was not very anxious to see a powerful central government dictating to the states on defense.
It would be interesting to see what their opinion, detailed opinion would be on what the states should be allowed to do about our borders.
Yeah, yeah.
It would be well, speaking of, if we're done with Webster, because I think that quote is so appropriate when he talks about a war waged for vicious purposes.
And I think we can almost put up that next clip because this, if you want to look at that up in the dictionary, this is what you would see.
You would talk about the U.S.'s attacks on and continued occupation of parts of Syria.
This has gone on for nearly 10 years.
And by definition, it is a war waged for vicious purposes.
And this headline is from The Cradle, and it comes to us via anti-war.com.
U.S. to establish new military base in northwest Syria.
And let's look at the next quote from that article.
The distribution, this is everything you need to know, I think, Dr. Paul.
The distribution of Washington's illegal bases resembles the cordon surrounding the sources of oil and gas located east of the Euphrates River, representing most of Syria's underground wealth.
The eastern countryside of Deir Azur hosts the most strategic military bases, including the Al-Omar oil field base, one of the largest in Syria, and the CONICO gas field base, which are regularly subjected to violent shelling by armed groups affiliated with Iran.
So we're occupying the part of Syria that has the wealth, that has the oil and gas wealth, and we're holding it illegally.
Yet at the same time, we lecture the rest of the world about the rules-based international order.
Right.
And it sounds like they're maintaining an empire, and it's getting more difficult always.
Now, the author of this writer, you know, used that quote that you took and had to do from Webster.
But the author of the article now says, let us no longer tarnish the image of our nation.
Let us learn from the wisdom of Daniel Webster and our founding fathers.
Let us bring our troops home and end this experiment in global imperialism.
Let us put America first and begin rebuilding our own republic.
Let us elect a future peace party.
And that can begin tomorrow on Election Day, but only if we do it.
But that's a big question at the end.
And that's, of course, what we're trying to dissect out and warn people about, because there are still factions.
And we've alluded to the fact that we always do.
There's a lot of influence and power with the money, the military-industrial complex.
We recognize that in the war against COVID.
I mean, just think how powerful the pharmaceuticals are.
And some claim they're more powerful than even the military-industrial.
That's hard for me to believe, but it might be true.
You know, when it comes down dollar for dollar.
And it's always this fear and sentiment, patriotism.
And how often has patriotism been drawn into the war on COVID?
You know, how people would challenge total strangers as if they were a terrorist ready to blow up their house or something.
You know, just horrible, totally out of control.
And We still have a job before us to try to get people to think about peace movements.
Peace movement.
Syria, beyond partisan.
That's what we're all about, beyond partisan peace movements.
Yeah, in a way, you know, we hope that some Republicans are elected that have our view.
But at the end of the day, for us, we're ready to get a movement.
We want a movement together.
So the Syria situation, you're right, really does dovetail perfectly with this Daniel Webster article.
We need a peace party.
We need to stop occupying Syria.
We need to stop stealing their oil.
And Trump even celebrated, yeah, we're going to take their oil.
And it's unseemly, but no one wants to talk about it.
The hypocrisy is so obvious.
But now we're not satisfied with stealing most of their oil.
We need to set up new bases.
And the irony here is that we set up bases, we irritate people who don't want our bases there, and they send rockets and shells at us.
And we say, oh, you're sending rockets and shells at us.
We feel unsafe.
We need to make new bases.
And on it goes.
Guess what?
They want to put more money.
We put money and investments into Syria for a long time.
We thought things were settled, but it did quiet down.
And there was a time when Trump said, just come home.
Remember when he was in the dimension?
I think he met a lot of resistance, but it didn't look like it took a lot of persuasion for him.
Oh, and I think he may have used words that alluded to the fact that the oil belongs to us.
Some people have the old Roman belief that once you conquer, you take that and you take what you can get and you pay all the bills on both sides, and even the military benefited from it.
But anyway, they want to set up a new base.
Coincidental, though, northeastern Syria.
Coincidental.
Is that where the oil is?
That's right, where the oil is.
And so this shouldn't surprise us all, but it tells you how pervasive it is and how difficult.
Even if you get some people maybe saying, well, I don't want to vote for that money for Ukraine, you know, because of the border issue.
We don't need to be defending those borders.
But there'll be so many other things in there that has nothing to do with Ukraine.
And then they'll go ahead and vote for it and rationalize it.
That's why it's so much easier.
I hope it was easier for my staff to figure things out.
But if you're against interventionism and against precipitating war and you are for the Constitution and you for peace, you don't have to say, on the one hand, you know, we have to do something like this.
On the other hand, something like this.
And I can remember staff coming to me and said, you know, I think we have an easy task because the other staffers come in and say, well, you, when they have to report to their Congressman, they say, well, here, these are the six people who really love this bill.
And here are the people that don't.
And fortunately for me, it was much easier.
Maybe it was just that I was just too lazy to believe I was smart enough to divvy up the loot.
I decided the loot shouldn't be loot.
It should be earnings and the people ought to be able to keep them here at home.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, we didn't want to tell you that because we don't get a pay cut, so we want to pretend we were working hard.
But, you know, I think you were reading in this article what the excuse the U.S. gave.
They don't come out and say these days that, hey, we want to steal the oil.
They give a different excuse for why we have to stay there.
Oh, yeah.
ISIS.
And I ask him immediately when I come in, who is this guy?
Who is this guy?
He pops up all the time.
Boy, he must be a real tyrant.
But, you know, well, the one thing is, Daniel, if you go in and you've made a mistake and the country didn't have any ISIS, before you know it, ISIS will be there.
I mean, think about Iraq.
Yeah, just add water.
It happens.
You know, if you subsidize it, they'll create more of it.
So we need enemies and we subsidize them all the time.
They end up with our weapons, our money, and our prestige and our Constitution.
They take that away from us because we sacrifice too much.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, by thanking our viewers.
We appreciate you coming to our events.
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We appreciate what support you can give us, and hope you'll continue to do so, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And we will be watching carefully with the election.
I am concerned if there will be anything close to a fair count and everybody's happy because I think we've been warned that that's probably not going to not likely to happen, that there's going to be some people making accusations.
And I think, you know, when it comes down to pure democracy, I think it lends itself to more of this mischief.
And, you know, the representative type government, you know, let's say you talk about Senate races.
Understanding Liberty's Foundations 00:03:32
You know, the original intent was that the states and their state legislatures, those individuals that were elected as much smaller groups, you know, would get together and decide who should represent the state at the federal level.
So what happened, you know, along with getting the income tax and a few other things, next they say, well, let's eliminate that.
We like democracy.
Well, and every day it sort of bugs me a bit how often you hear the word, they're going to ruin democracy, democracy.
And, you know, all I could think of was if I was involved in one of these discussions or in a debate, I say, would you please define democracy?
And why do you like a system that is designed to be able to dominate over minorities?
If you have the dictatorship of the majority, you never protect the minority.
And yet the people who pretend they're protecting the minority are the ones who are screaming and hollering that we have to do everything conceivable to protect democracy.
That doesn't mean you can't have an election to find out who your leaders are, who your governor might be, but that's not what they're talking about.
And they detest the whole principle of self-reliance and following the Constitution and having a foreign policy of non-intervention, having sound money.
It's strictly unrelated to that because right now people are so dependent and so addicted to the spending that we have a long way to go and that's why I don't think it'll be a smooth transition.
But the transition will come just as the transition was predicted many years before the Bretton Woods pseudo-gold standard would collapse and it did just as the predictions came.
But it wasn't overnight.
It doesn't happen immediately.
So some of the things that I'm concerned about, it might not happen next week or two, but believe me, the foundation is fragile and that's what we should be concerned about.
So the goal that I see our organization and the things that I've done over the years is to present an alternative to what we have.
So if the people finally give up, what can they substitute it with?
Sometimes you can destroy a society and destroy a government, but almost always throughout history, the governments get worse.
And it's been a rare circumstance that some have argued the case that there's only been one war where the people actually ended up with more liberty than they had before the war.
And that was our revolution.
But most of the time, the people have less liberty and they're poorer.
And there's a lot of people suffered.
The families are destroyed.
And so it's just so strange that so many people just still blindly see this as a patriotic duty.
If it's declared and we have to have a war and we have ISIS is there.
Oh my God, I didn't know that.
We better give up on that thing.
They're bad people and we have to take care of it.
So I do think that understanding the principles of liberty and understanding the goals that the founders had for us, if we start there, we would get a pretty good start for cleaning up this mess after we pay the bills.
And it looks like, unfortunately, right now, payment of the bills is occurring, and that's why we have such economic chaos at the stores and at the gas station.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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