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Feb. 20, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
15:14
Ron Paul's Speech From Rage Against The War Machine Rally

The Rage Against The War Machine rally was held at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC on Feb. 19, 2023...the anniversary of the Ukraine War.

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Time Text
A Lot of Friends Energized 00:03:37
Up next we've got the man, the myth, the legend, the hero of the liberty movement, former presidential candidate, and former congressman.
Let's give it up for Congressman Dr. Ron Paul.
In the Fed.
Oh, right over here.
They stole my line.
No, I was going to say and open up by saying thank you very much.
I appreciate the invitation.
I like to visit places where I have friends.
There are a lot of friends of liberty out here and a lot of friends of peace.
So I get energized with coming here.
A lot of people give me some credit for coming and helping them along.
But the truth is, I get energized.
Thank you very much for coming, and thank you very much for inviting me.
You know, I was going to say that we've heard a lot of speeches and a lot of opinions, and everybody has joined in.
I didn't hear anybody saying we need to expand the war.
We're not doing well in Ukraine, but we need to take on the Russians.
That'll go better.
Oh, no, we need to go to China and we're still struggling in Syria.
No, nobody's for that.
At least I haven't heard them.
They didn't get a place.
I hope they didn't get a place on the platform for that.
So this has been, you know, wonderful to come to a place that comes together on this issue.
But the one thing is that I've emphasized over the years when speaking in a couple of campaigns is that it's serious.
And we just heard this very serious dissertation about how serious the problem we deal with.
But, you know, with that, understanding how serious this is, my admonition is always come together and have fun.
And I understand a lot of people have been having fun today, meeting new people and joining.
I think that's great.
But, you know, I also came because I've been concerned.
I've been really worried about something.
And I haven't figured it out yet.
I'm not into technology and all, but I want to know more about this thing called artificial intelligence.
What is that all about?
But you know, I figured it out.
I put up with it for 23 years in the Congress, and there was a lot of artificial intelligence over there, let me tell you.
A lot of innuendos and whatnot.
But, you know, I wanted to simplify my speech, and of course, somebody stole my line.
But I think that we can deal with the war issue very simply.
And believe me, and I'll explain it more why I believe this, that the answer is, and the Fed.
I knew there were friends here.
Thank you.
Why Wars Seem Justifiable 00:11:37
No, and there's a reason why ending the Fred Fed is a movement towards stopping these wars.
How do they finance them?
They have to tax the people.
Well, they tax them with income taxes and all kinds of taxes, but they never have enough money.
They never have enough money, so they have to borrow a lot of money, and then people get tired borrowing the money and loaning the money to the government.
So what do they do?
They have this little gimmick called run up the debt and print the money.
And you know, if you're on the side of thinking our government is too big, and as libertarians, we generally think the government's too big all over the place.
And we'd like to cut back.
So if you can't print the money and you can't collect the taxes by debasing the currency and stealing the wealth from the people, unnerving the middle class and the poor, because that's who really pays for this, you couldn't have a war.
You couldn't have runaway spending.
You couldn't have debts.
And we should have it in the Constitution.
And Jefferson argued for it.
He said that you shouldn't even be allowed to have debt.
I think that's a pretty good idea.
No debt at all.
So that is the way they do.
Soften it up, and the people go along with it and figure that, yes, we can do it, but they don't understand what's happening.
But why do the people go along with it?
And we spent a lot of time over the Mideast wars trying to stop that war.
I didn't do too well.
They still had the war.
And they want, you keep wondering, why do they do it?
Why does the government do it?
It doesn't make any sense.
And why do the people go to war?
You know, one thing I'd like to suggest is if we ever got around to thinking that we ought to vote on the wars instead of letting an executive order take us to war, we ought to have a vote.
If you think you should have a war, have a vote, and make sure that the vote is carried out by the people between 18 and 24.
That is the group that gets punished the most.
And the others could recreate the wars.
But, you know, trying to figure still out of that, I thought I'd ask this guy that sort of just helped destroy Germany, Hermann Göring.
You remember him?
And he has a famous quote out there.
Why do the people do it?
And this was after he was convicted at Nuremberg, you know, that he had some interviews.
They said, why did the people do it?
And he had two things.
He says, one, you've got to lie to the people, and they have to be big lies.
If they're just routine lies, they won't believe it.
But if they're so big, it's so outrageous, they'll say, nobody could believe that's true, and they'd ignore it.
But tell big lies and tell them often that people will go along with the war.
Yeah, but still, why do the people do it?
And they march off.
And a lot of the wars start off, people are against the war, World War II, and certainly the Middle Eastern wars, the people were opposed to it.
And this is Goring, and Paul paraphrased, of course.
He says, scare the living daylights out of the people.
Tell them they aren't patriotic and they aren't for peace and embarrass them.
He says it works every time in every system of government in every country.
Just scare the living daylights out of people.
You know, I think that type of an analysis applies to our war, scare the people and patriotism.
And I'll bet you there's many people in this audience that have had to be on the receiving end of that type of thing.
Oh, you're not for the wars.
You're un-American.
And they did that once to me in the campaign.
And it turned out that they were accusing me of being unpatriotic.
I wouldn't support the war.
You wouldn't support the troops.
But when somebody came up with a statistic, it showed that Ron Paul had the most donations from the military.
And then I got to thinking, well, why should that be a surprise?
I was in the military.
They sort of drafted me and I was in.
But the people I knew, they were decent people, and the draft was on at that time.
And they would say, well, why are you doing this?
And the draft, the draft, of course, has not been used, but there's other ways of doing it.
The books should be clean.
If we're not for the draft, why do we have registration?
They know where every one of us is.
Not every year where you sign up with taxes.
Every minute of the day, they know where every one of us is, and then they still make us go through the ritual of registering in case there's a war going on.
You know, it's psychological preparation for people to know that if you want to be a good citizen and you want to be a patriot, you have to go to the wars.
And people go along with that.
And they don't want to be called unpatriotic.
And I think we all sense and understand and may have some empathy for that.
But it's wrong.
It's deception.
And it's part of this thing called artificial intelligence.
They come in and they lie through their teeth.
And it's all artificial.
But the artificialness of it is such that what you hear there, it might be disinformation.
And they have to twist it, twist it around.
If an individual is guilty of disinformation, have you ever noticed they might blame their opposition for doing exactly what they're doing?
They reverse it.
And so there's a lot of fakery.
This gets down to the whole issue of seeking truth in the big picture.
We seek truth as we come to events like this and when we run for office and we write and talk.
And so many people here have their own way of spreading a message.
So yes, that is real good.
But what we need, though, is some people really understanding the issues because that is what will finally get people to change their minds rather than waiting.
You know, one of the lines that was helpful for me in the campaigning, they would say, yeah, Ron, that's okay.
We're with you on this.
But it's so complicated.
Well, how do you stop these wars?
I said, you just marched in.
We can just march home.
But now I've changed that a little bit.
We shorten that.
We have to anticipate, just don't send them in at all.
You know, there's such a fallacy, and this is part of the propaganda thing, that it's so necessary, not for patriotic reasons, but for other reasons.
And there's always an excuse.
The one that annoys me the most, or at least close to the most, is this argument.
They'll say, we need a good war right now.
We're having a recession.
Have a war, and we'll get out of the recession.
And this is a lingering of us foolhardy idea that the World War II got us out of the Great Depression.
That's stupid.
It wasn't true at all.
The Depression got worse.
Besides, we sent hundreds of thousands of people over getting shot at and killed, and they say, Oh, the war is good.
That'll get us out of our depression.
So, there's all kinds of excuses like that.
And they don't mention the many things that have already been mentioned at this conference: that there's ulterior motives and profits.
And we're getting too many of these special groups, like the military industrial complex, we have the pharmaceutical industrial complex, the medical industrial complex, and the whole works.
What we need to do is have a people's independence, and they're the ones who should be looked at.
And you know, another little rule that I think we should follow is that, and this is one word, I like to narrow down my philosophy.
And the other word that I like is voluntarism.
Wouldn't that be a wonderful world to live in?
That if you apply voluntarism, which is nonviolence, and you have voluntarism, well, what do you mean?
Does that mean you can go to the store and buy what you want?
No, voluntary means that everything is done when it involves two groups or two people voluntarily.
Both sides have to agree, otherwise, you avoid it.
You can't force anybody to do anything.
And you know what?
What would happen?
Peace would break out.
So, therefore, you have to have the hoodlums up there making it as though it's not voluntary.
Then, somebody gets to write a lot of regulations and they get to do all the nonsense they do, and then they bankrupt the country.
So, that's the problem.
I think voluntarism is just a great idea.
And the other thing is, when government comes to knocking on your door, that is the tough thing.
And they will tell you one reason why they're doing this because we're on the side of truth and the side of democracy and all these things.
I work on the assumption of the issue of truth, I think, is very, very important.
That's what we're seeking here.
That's why you're here.
But we know the truth.
We generally agree with peace is good and war is bad.
So, we're pretty good on that.
But we have to realize that a lot of other people, you know, have to say that a lot of other people don't know much about it.
I have a personal belief that we as individuals also seek for excellence and virtue.
If we accept voluntarism and we accept this promotion of excellence and virtue, what would happen with that?
If that happened, the government would be minuscule and they would be much better and maybe a little more virtuous.
Thank you very much.
Ron Paul!
Thank you so much, Dr. Paul.
Thank you so much.
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