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March 28, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:05
Senate Anti-TikTok Bill Is 'Patriot Act For Technology'

Like the PATRIOT Act after 9/11, the RESTRICT Act introduced in the Senate is using a "crisis" to decimate our core Constitutional liberties. The bill gives any presidential administration the power to simply end any social media company it deems a "national security threat." Also today: US pressuring Europe to break with China - will it work?

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Time Text
Stopping Bad Legislation 00:15:24
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well, doing well.
Good, good.
And we're trying to stop some bad legislation, bad ideas.
Very bad.
And it looks like we're going to be busy the whole morning.
No, the whole day.
The whole week.
No kidding.
Seems to me like ever since we got to know each other, this now on what, 10, 15, more years?
More years.
That's about all we've been trying to do is stop it.
And every once in a while, somebody will give us a little credit, and I figure they're stretching it.
They're just being nice.
But who knows?
And my argument is we never know.
We never know exactly.
Our job is to do our very best to seek out truth and to present it to try to convert people with the nonviolent approach to what was intended by our republic and which we no longer have.
And you know what?
I would say we have an audience out there.
The audience is there, and we get a lot of positive feedback.
But certainly the audience for the general public comes from the mainstream media.
And it sounds like they control everything.
And politically, they might control almost everything.
They control a lot in our universities and the media.
But the truth is, I have not been convinced that the numbers are overwhelming and that this is all a fruitless adventure.
I think we have a lot of friends out there, and we need to just keep working and get more people to join with us in this effort.
Today, we have a reminder of something I did in the early part of this century, right after 9-11, because it was not too long after 9-11.
Within a week, they had the Patriot Act up.
And that's when I discovered, I said, how'd you guys do this?
Did you have any hearing?
Oh, no, no.
It's been around for a while.
And we knew we'd need it.
And so they slapped it up there.
And, you know, the atmosphere was just so overwhelming.
Of course, I took a position that was not exactly the most popular position.
But it turned out that that issue in the Patriot Act, as you recall, by 07, when a few people talked me into running, you know, in the presidential race, I was really impressed by the number of people that if I didn't mention it, they mentioned it.
The Patriot Act, the Patriotic Act became well known, and they knew what it was, and they were, you know, speaking out against it.
And these were average college kids.
It wasn't like it was a canned audience.
So I was encouraged by that.
But now we have something that I don't know how you'll call this match or an addition to or something that we want to send out a warning for because we don't know where it's going to go, but it's called the Restrict Act.
And it sounds like they want to restrict all that transfer of technology and our intelligence to China.
China's the bad guys, so we have to do anything.
And the atmosphere is overwhelming.
There's a bill introduced to the Senate.
I think there were more Republicans on it than Democrats.
So unfortunately, there was a time when Democrats were civil libertarians, and then it shifted.
And Republicans, now it's too much split.
And that's obviously been going on in a while on security as well as foreign policy because over all these years, the military budget is always passed bipartisan-wise, but less enthusiastically than it used to be.
So we are making progress.
But this bill comes up because they're using China as the enemy.
We have to check on China.
And I think it's our opinion that just like the Patriot Act backfire, it was checking on American citizen us.
And I think we see enough in here.
People need to wake up and realize.
I don't think it's been introduced in the House yet, been introduced in the Senate, but be aware of it so that we can make sure that our listeners are informed.
You know, there's a kind of a pathology, I think, kind of a mental illness in America that we feel like we can't survive without an official enemy.
You know, and the enemy of the day is China.
We have to hate China.
Well, there's a social media that I guess is Chinese-owned TikTok.
It's very, very popular with young people.
They upload videos of themselves.
Well, the U.S. government and the China hawks have identified it as a tool of Chinese intelligence to spy on these kids making these videos.
And of course, that makes the NSA jealous because that's their job to spy on us making videos.
So, of course, you create this problem and then you exploit it to take away our liberties, just like as you say, with the Patriot Act.
Of course, we were attacked on 9-11.
There should have been a response.
But what was the response?
It was to restrict our liberties, not to restrict the terrorist liberties.
And we found that out, of course, by 2013 when Ed Snowden let us know that they were spying on us.
But this bill came to my attention yesterday, and I immediately shared it with you because it brought back a lot of bad memories of the Patriot Act.
And thankfully, our friend Jordan Schachtel, who's done some great work, and let's put this up, he's got a great substat called the dossier, which we definitely recommend.
And he's written about it today.
He said, the Patriot Act on steroids, the DC Uniparty, wants to use anti-TikTok legislation as a Trojan horse for censorship and surveillance.
And so, again, they use this manufactured crisis that the Chinese are going to spy on us through TikTok and use it to not just get rid of TikTok.
The Restrict Act is for everything.
And here's a great little clip that was embedded in Jordan's piece.
And it's Ian Crossland, who's on Timcast.
And let's just do that first minute, 10 seconds.
Why don't we full screen that and do that first minute and 10 seconds when he describes what this is all about?
This bill that's been introduced into the Senate, it's called the Restrict Act, is so dangerous because there really isn't much of a difference in these companies.
If you start generally targeting social media companies for people doing things you don't like on those networks, it gives you carte blanche to just start ending networks, ending TikTok, ending Twitter.
We're banning Twitter.
We're banning YouTube because somebody on YouTube said that an election was fake.
Like, I'm reading this bill.
It's called the Restrict Act.
Maybe we can pull this up at some point.
And there's a few sections in the Restrict Act that are completely insane.
Section 3, what do we have?
Section 31C is insane.
It's Section 3A1C.
What it says is, oh my God, this is so crazy, dude.
This is like the Patriot Act for technology, basically.
We cannot allow this kind of power.
It gives the Secretary of Commerce the ability to.
Oh, God, it's so.
Okay, so let's see.
Section 3A.
The Secretary, in consultation with the relevant executive department agency heads, is authorized to and shall take action to identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate these technologies, is what they're saying.
If they pose an undue or unacceptable risk of interfering with the result or reported result of a federal election.
And they're saying like if a person, this is any covered transaction by any person or with respect to any property subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
So any American citizen.
So essentially what it does is it gives the Secretary of Commerce and I believe the Secretary of State and a few other government officials the ability to simply, and as he says, it gives them carte blanche to just start ending networks.
And basically one of the things that he mentioned here is any network, it could be YouTube, it could be Twitter, it could be anything that's deemed as interfering or misreporting election results can simply be canceled by the U.S. government.
It sets an unbelievable precedent.
All you have to do is identify it as a foreign entity, which they've done.
They identify the entire Trump presidency as a foreign entity.
All they have to do is do that, and that's the low threshold to just cancel everything.
You know, the way it works, and you've already mentioned part of what's going on, that you have to have an enemy, and you have to scare the people, and then somebody has to come and do something for you, and they're going to protect you from this enemy.
Whether it was the Patriot Act or whether it was to protect us against COVID or whatever, had to have the enemy, had to have scare people, and you had to rely on lies, and you had to get people who ordinarily tell the truth, start telling lies, and cause all this mess.
But the one theme that usually really wins over, and I hear it on the radio all the time, and they don't think of it even in any way a controversial issue because in a way the sentiment is a little controversial because all of a sudden the government comes force and they scare the 11 wits out of everybody.
And the statement is, what we want to do is your government, and our job of the government is to make you safe.
And when you stop and think about that, that motive sounds wonderful because we all want to be safe.
We just happen to think the government is not a very good entity for making us safe.
This is what they're doing.
But this is why the people open up and say, you know, this sounds terrible.
I don't like it.
I don't want them to have to do this.
But by golly, you know, we've got to get those Chinese and we got to protect ourselves and we have to keep our people safe.
And then the people roll over.
Yeah.
Well, the Mises Caucus of the Libertarian Party, someone over there had the coffee this morning or yesterday because they did a pretty darn good job of analyzing.
And I started reading this bill.
I did not read the whole thing.
I will say it's a very long bill.
They did a good job of going through it.
And you might say, well, they're only picking out the worst parts.
Well, those are the parts that are going to be used.
So I'm going to go through a couple of these, Dr. Paul, if you don't mind.
Just because they did such good work, if we can put up that next one from the Mises Caucus, and they're going to summarize this bill.
And here's what they say.
The Restrict Act does not limit to just TikTok.
It gives the government authority over all forms of communication, domestic or abroad, and grants powers to enforce, to quote, enforce any mitigation measure to address any risk, end quote, to national security now and at any, quote, potential future transaction.
Anything, anytime, anywhere.
Do the next one now.
I think there's four of them here, and it's very good to just look and see what they say.
And they have, and you can look these up.
So what happens if you are designated a national security threat?
What can they access of yours to confirm it?
Everything.
Notice the preemptive attack on quantum encryption in there too.
And go to the next one.
And they cite every part of the bill where it handles this.
It also allows the Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Commerce the authority to universally designate new, quote, foreign adversaries without notifying Congress and a 15-day window to notify the President.
It also requires a joint resolution of Congress to overturn.
They listed five or six of our foreign adversaries, including Russia, Venezuela, under the current president.
When they overthrow him, they'll change it probably.
But they can add any they want at any time.
And go to the next one.
If you recall from before, quote, foreign individuals can now also be U.S. citizens that are deemed a national security threat.
Once designated, the bill grants the authority to enforce any action deemed necessary to mitigate the threat with no due process and few limits on punishments.
And I think here's the last one, if we can go to it.
After the federal government has detained you without due process to mitigate the immediate threat you pose, what kind of punishments await you in court?
A million-dollar fine, 20 years in prison, and forfeiture of everything you own.
And it sounds pretty crazy and extreme, but that's how they do things.
As you know, I mean, I've read legislation for you for a long time.
And the language is constructed so that's sufficiently vague to be able to be interpreted in any way they want.
And I think the Mises Caucus did a good job of interpreting this.
You know, Jordan made a point, which I think is important too, because he was trying to make some analogies and he talked about digital opium.
And, you know, that introduces the notion of a war on drugs and the drugs are killing people.
It's not our policies or anything else.
It's always some mystical thing, like, in this case, you can compare it to it.
And he actually says that is done to further curtail our individual rights.
That sort of opens it up.
It's not just, you know, a technical way of probably making sure that people don't steal from us.
It's more than that.
And it's so often the motivation, you know, it's back to this.
Well, these people can't be that evil.
And at least I don't always, I don't want to start with that.
But, you know, as time has gone on, I've sort of softened my stand on that because I think I've met them.
I've seen them.
I've listened to them.
And I've witnessed their policies that they want.
And they are evil in many ways, but it still doesn't convince me that they're really in charge.
I think that this whole idea that they justify telling lies and lies are best to protect the government and the state and what we're doing good.
We can't do good unless the people are fooled a little bit.
And this is something that they believe in.
So naming it and turning it around and say, it's like the war on drugs.
Who else is going to fight opium and all this mess?
Well, there are other ways for that.
It turned out, which I think a lot of people still believe, except there's an exemption for a few.
It's the war on telling people how what they should do for health reasons, take and not take, is more deadly than the disease.
You know, the drugs kill people.
They're horrible.
But the war on drugs is ghastly because it introduced this notion.
Here they're using it as an excuse to really expand the police state.
And some of these analysis now about shrinking all populations to these teeny little cities.
We can control the people better.
If there's a million cities with a few people in, and they will have to obey, and we'll keep them safe.
We'll put them in this fence around their city, and we'll keep them safe.
Yeah.
Well, as Jordan also points out, it's not just a TikTok ban.
It's much more than that.
It's a mechanism for massive sweeping surveillance and censorship overhaul.
Banning Beyond TikTok 00:02:52
He points out it goes way beyond banning TikTok.
It gives the government basically the unchecked ability to monitor all U.S. communications infrastructure to decide if it's an enemy or not an enemy.
And that's a real danger.
They shouldn't have that.
Now, people go on Facebook and the other social media companies, and those companies collect data about them and sell it to advertisers.
That's their model.
That's how they make money.
Well, the Chinese are doing that with TikTok, and it's the same kind of thing.
If you don't want your kid to go on TikTok, don't let him go on TikTok.
If you're 20 years old and you want to go on TikTok and you want to make goofy videos and the Chinese are going to collect information and sell you stuff, that's your business, I think.
But they're making this some big thing that somehow some guy in Des Moines who's making a goofy dance video is compromising our national security.
But because the Chinese can figure out what he's doing when he makes a video, I'm just not buying it.
I mean, I think this is an excuse for a huge power grab using the prejudice against China, the hatred toward China, to take away our liberties.
And I think it's a huge problem.
Hopefully, keep this on your radar screen.
People should keep it on the radar screen and fight back now before it goes through.
And when they approach it the way we've been talking about, you know, they quickly come to, we've got to ban it.
Yeah.
Ban the whole thing.
They don't think it through on whether or not there's something available for the individual, the individual sell of the family, who knows what?
Maybe they could learn something in their spiritual life or something.
But there are places where you can, I think, restrict and ban the garbage.
And that is if taxpayers' money's involved.
And that is why it's a horror that we've allowed our school system, our government school system to be so prevalent in all our lives and all our kids.
And the indoctrination, whether it's medical indoctrination, whether it's genderism and all this garbage that's going around, the government money shouldn't be spent on it.
But that doesn't mean that you should use the hammer and say, well, we need to get rid of TikTok altogether.
But that's the approach.
But that's where they get their power.
You justify whether it's drugs or whatever.
We want the power to abolish the things we don't like.
And they're tyrants.
And I don't know what they would say if they were sitting here and saying, hey, you know, we oppose what you're doing because you're nothing more than a tyrant.
They wouldn't be happy.
They would just tell us another lie.
Yeah, another lie.
Well, let's move on to something else that we noticed.
Europeans Caught Between Powers 00:03:26
And this has to do with China and the U.S. putting more pressure on the Europeans to stop doing business with China.
And this is a piece on Politico.
We can go ahead and put that up.
Ukraine is changing the math for countries caught between the U.S. and China.
Now, this is mostly focused on Europe, and Europe does a lot of business with China, as we do.
But as China and Russia get closer, and the recent visit of Xi to visit with Putin just underscored how close they are getting.
Of course, most of that is because of U.S. policy.
But nevertheless, so the U.S. is now trying to tell Europe, hey, you need to take a side.
You need to stop doing business with China or you're going to get in further trouble.
That's essentially what the article is saying.
The article says that the Europeans are starting to listen.
They were ignoring us for a while.
Now they're starting to listen.
I wonder if that's true.
Well, and the whole thing is, if it is, they're being ridiculous.
They're not thinking it through because they say since Russia is the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we have to do something.
But it's always couched in that.
And they never try to change it.
There must be a few people that know a little bit about the history of what's going on with Russia, with Ukraine, with 2014, the coup in that area.
And yes, they're complaining about Russia's invasion.
But how often have we heard anybody talk seriously on mainstream media about NATO's aggressive attitude toward putting missiles surrounding Russia?
No, that's off limits.
And I see the Russians struck back the other today that I think there's four or five countries that have not joined the restrictions placed voluntarily by the countries on nuclear missiles.
And there are about five of them that have not agreed to it.
But we have our missiles, our nuclear is in there anyway.
So, yeah, we talk a good game.
But, you know, this is a tough sell because we have to go against our natural desire, at least my natural desire, that there's been so much good about the country and there's so many good people in this country.
And the ideas are still there.
And so you don't want to just say every single thing that ever happened is horrible.
But that's why so many of us resort to how did our country get started?
And we know exactly they were against tyrants and they introduced like no other time in history the whole notion of personal liberty and put it into the document of the Constitution.
But unfortunately, that's been so weakened they almost laugh at you when you cite the Constitution.
Yeah.
Well the people that are sick of taking orders from Washington are deemed enemies.
And then Washington expects every other country to sign on board and also deem them enemies to the detriment of their own economy, of their economic future.
And it's just a massive fail for the United States government because it's not working.
We're putting Russia and China in each other's arms.
Iran is coming in.
We talked about it yesterday.
New trade routes.
So we're basically facilitating the kind of change that we claim we're against.
I have to scratch my head on this one, but we'll keep an eye out.
Americans Buying Into Propaganda 00:08:08
We want to do one final one if you're ready to move on.
Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
One little line here because it said the Europeans are starting to pay more attention to Biden's message about the danger of independent dictatorship.
Is this real or is it just a little bit of propaganda?
That's what I don't know.
And we're not under any illusion that the Chinese are saying.
They follow their own national interests.
They have authoritarian social policy and they are looking out for themselves.
And that reminds me again, of course, of our sponsor of the show this month, which is 4patriots.com.
And they have warned us in a piece that they sent over that the Chinese are hoarding food.
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And let's move on to our last one if you're ready, Dr. Paul.
And this is something that we noticed on Zero Hedge originally from Real Clear Politics.
And you noticed it this morning.
The real insurrection and the dirty politics of January 6th.
We can even put that up.
This is when I talk about this, I have to be a little bit cautious because I get very upset with it and I want to stick with the fact.
But it is so bad.
And I think this violation, even though literally there's no people being killed and rolled over like wars do, but it's still a big deal.
I mean, if this stuff stands, that's why there are some in the Republican Party now trying to sort it out and find out what's going on.
But I want to just read one sentence or two from that article.
The Department of Retaliation had sent a letter to the chief judge of the D.C. federal court warning, warning that between 700 and 1,200 more people will be charged.
Boy, they really had a well-organized insurrection.
How many guns did they get?
You know, I think they're still searching for that one gun.
With January 6th crime, more than two years after the fact, that brings the total of citizens likely to be charged unfairly and criminally to approximately 2,000.
And according to the White House, these are all domestic terrorists.
I mean, just use words.
That's just horrible.
Yeah.
I think you said it yesterday when we were talking before the show.
This is kind of a religion to a lot of the Democrats.
You know, they can't let go of this.
So now 2,000 Americans will have had their lives ruined.
Now, if people kicked things over and knocked over poor old Nancy Pelosi's computer, they should be forced to pay for it.
It's not right to do that.
But nevertheless, people, I think there was a grandmother who was just arrested yesterday who just went in and walked around for 15 minutes, the people's house.
So they keep doing it.
Julie Kelly wrote about it.
They keep doing it.
They keep doing it.
And that's a great quote that you had.
But here's something else that goes with it.
If we can skip and go ahead to the next one, which I think is the last clip on here.
There we go.
And this is also the other part of what you were reading, Dr. Paul.
It says, now to be clear, there was at least one instance of terrorism on January 6th when pipe bombs were placed at the national quarters of the Republican and Democratic parties.
But the perpetrator of that failed attack has never been identified, let alone charged.
Instead, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the House January 6th Select Committee, and the White House have focused on making examples out of American citizens who believe that a corrupt election had been held in 2020.
Why haven't they found the pipe bombers?
Because they're busy arresting Americans.
Arresting Americans.
So, well, it is such a tragedy.
And they do it all in the name of justice and fairness and safety.
And the one that really hits me is when a Nancy Pelosi type, and there are a lot of them out there, they say, well, we have to do this.
We have to do this because we believe in the Constitution.
And we want to enforce the Taj Constitution.
And therefore, we have to provide safety for our country and our Constitution and civil liberties.
And it's all fighting some war overseas and innocent people being killed.
And, you know, Americans, I think, are fair, but it's hard to be fair when you hear nothing but the garbage because they never say, you know, there's a lot of American citizens who've been killed since World War II, you know, in wars that were illegal.
But how many non-Americans have been victim who never attacked us or were victimized and killed by our bombs and our aggressive foreign policy?
That is never taken into consideration.
But that's considered, that may be a moral issue, but who cares about that?
That wouldn't work because it's not patriotic enough.
If you're patriotic, you know, I was accused of not being patriotic because I wanted to bring our soldiers home from an illegal war where they were just wasting lives and money and our liberties.
And that was called treason, unfortunately.
But we'll keep plugging away.
You have a closing statement?
Yeah, I do.
I would just like to remind our viewers, it's easy to buy into this whole enemy thing.
We don't have to have enemies across the world.
We can take care of ourselves.
We can be careful and cautious individually, but the government is not going to protect us from the enemies that it designates.
It's doing that for a reason, and that's to manipulate us to its own benefit and power.
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Dr. Paul?
Yes.
It's really not complicated.
And a lot of times I would be asked that question when I describe our problems.
I say it was really not that complicated.
They said, well, what can I do?
You could start by reading the Constitution and believing we're supposed to follow it, which is a tough sell.
That read, if people were converted to that, a lot of the problems would be solved.
The foreign policy would be solved.
There's been restrictions on that.
The founders did not want us to go to war unless the people spoke through their members of Congress in making a declaration of war.
And we quit doing that after World War II.
We never do that.
And the other thing that we could do in looking at it, except on principle, the non-interventionist foreign policy.
But then again, if you still, there's confusion on what about ABCD?
What do we do?
Well, I think one thing that I pay attention to and really helps guide one that's looking for where are the limits and what can we do is Article 1, Section 8.
And that tells you this is what the government's allowed to do.
But the tragedy is that for 50, 75 years, liberals and conservatives have been taught that you can do anything you want unless it's been prohibited by the Constitution.
That's not it.
They tell you what you can do, and what do they say in the 9th and 10th Amendment?
It's then up to the individuals in the states.
And those two principles would solve our problems.
We'd be wealthier, safer, and a lot happier.
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