All Episodes
Previous Next
March 30, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:27
Rand SLAMS TikTok Ban!

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) came out swinging against a move by a fellow Republican Senator to ban the popular social media app TikTok by unanimous consent. Citing the First Amendment of the US Constitution, Sen. Paul vowed to resist any attempts to restrict the speech of Americans. Also today...US Senate (finally) votes to repeal the disastrous 2002 Iraq War authorization. And: a sneak peek into a corrupt DC court.

|

Time Text
Problem with TikTok Ban 00:14:35
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 this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Doing well.
Excellent.
We have to look for good news, and we found some bad news, but maybe a little bit of good news today.
But it's not all negative out there.
We have people that will come through.
We were just talking a minute ago, you know, Daniel.
I said, you know, these bad judges, they point that out, and we are going to talk about that a little bit.
How come we never hear about any impeachment?
If they can impeach a president twice, I would think some of these judges are impeachable.
But they don't talk about that.
So I guess maybe that'll come later.
You can't even impeach them by a vote in the next election.
Well, there's a thing going on, and somebody by the name of Paul was in the news, and he was talking about TikTok.
And I glanced at that, and I figured, well, he'll be okay on this.
And he certainly is okay on it because somebody got up and, you know, the Restrict Act was really bad.
We talked about that the other day, how evil it was.
And yet they wanted to pass it, but people are starting to reckon, oh, it's too radical.
They just really want to hit them hard, you know, and cancel them out and, you know, not let them exist.
So the Restrict Act was intended well, but it was doing a lot of harm, more harm than good.
So Senator Hawley said, well, what you do then is you have to work with the opposition.
So he came up with another bill, which was backing off a little bit.
And it sounds like, well, we're going to clamp down on them, but we'll have to do something because the people in TikTok might talk to the Chinese.
Yeah, it's a Chinese company that has interests in this country.
I mean, the whole thing is bizarre that they're willing to do this.
So Rand goes after him for the right reason.
Way, I figure, because it doesn't solve the problem.
It doesn't solve the problem of the Restrict Act.
And even if Hawley's bill would be passed long term, I imagine that would morph into the Restrict Act, one way or the other.
Yeah, it doesn't it always.
Well, let's put up that first clip, and this is from the Hill.
We notice on anti-war.com.
But Rand Paul plans to block Josh Hawley's bill to ban TikTok.
Senator Hawley just puts in a bill that says, we're going to ban this company.
You know, it's insane.
It shows courage on the part of Senator Paul because, you know, China is, we've got to have an enemy.
You always got to have an enemy.
And people like Josh Hawley, they're not that crazy about going to war with Russia, but they're certainly happy to go to war with China for some reason.
But, you know, Senator Paul makes a very, very basic point that shouldn't be shocking, but unfortunately, these days it is shocking.
And this is an article that he wrote in the Courier Journal yesterday.
If we can put that up, this is common sense, Dr. Paul.
He says, if you don't like TikTok or Facebook or YouTube, don't use them.
But don't think any interpretation of the Constitution gives you the right to ban them.
So his rationale was very clear.
Under the First Amendment, you can't just ban people from exercising their right to free speech.
Yes, and it gets messy.
The social media has been involved.
Everybody was very, very unhappy because we knew that they were not independent business people in a corporation, that they were working deals with the government and wheeling and dealing and both of them serving each other's interests.
And the solution wasn't ban Facebook and ban these companies, but it certainly came thanks to Jonathan Turley and a few others pointing out there's a big difference is when you get benefits from the government, this is no longer a free corporation.
Same way with TikTok.
They're talking about something, but I would think they have been less influential in pointing out that it's all the government's fault.
I think the government was more embedded with Facebook than they have been with TikTok, but I stand to be corrected on that because I don't understand all the details.
But from what I read, it doesn't look like, you know, it looks like the Chinese were trying to live within their limits because right now they sort of have this soft spot somewhere, place with market economies and capitalism.
And so they're trying to go along on some of the agreements on how to deal with these and investigate both China and TikTok.
And the American government has to be checked too because sometimes they spy on people.
No kidding.
Well, here's a good example.
And this is a short clip, but this is Senator Hawley's rationale for this.
And he's, of course, you know, we praise him when he deserves praise, but when he deserves scorn, he does.
And this time he really does.
Let's play the first 16 seconds of this clip where he explains why he wants to ban TikTok for everyone.
The problem with TikTok is not the videos on the app.
The problem with TikTok is it's a backdoor for the Chinese Communist Party into the personal lives and information, into the most intimate details of every American's life.
So he wants to ban it because it's a backdoor for the Chinese Communist Party to learn the most intimate details of every American's life.
Well, that goes back to what Senator Paul says.
Then don't use it.
If you don't want the Chinese party, if you don't want anyone to know about your personal life, don't go on social media.
And he doesn't even get into the accusations that finally were made against Facebook, where the FBI was involved in the collusion.
And there's not been that type of a challenge.
But I think that it's overly simplistic and they're not dealing with it in the whole idea of maybe there is a Constitution, and we don't limit it to people, people who are telling it the truth and not stealing and killing.
They can do what they want.
But he didn't even allude to that.
I think even before the evidence was very clear about the FBI being involved with Facebook, most of us were very suspicious.
Because I always say, well, investigate, find out, you're going to find some collusion between corporatism, the corporations, and social media.
But there was no hint of that.
But his point was, and he's sort of, you know, with blinders on, it's China, it's China, it's China.
As if all you have to do is say China.
Well, and then how do they look at us?
You people, you're not very good patriots.
You mean you like China?
Yeah.
No, we don't like China or anybody.
It's any better.
What we like is free trade and getting along with people.
And we don't like war.
And so when you go out of your way with sanctions and economic problems, I think they're and they and they are pretty much open on that.
There are some people who literally say that we have to confront them.
If we don't, it'll be too late.
They bring up Neville Chamberlain's name just to say, see what happens when you try to get along with people.
And no, we don't hear that debate at all.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's a word that's so overused that it's lost its meaning, and I hesitate to use it.
But to a degree, I think there is kind of an element of racism in this.
You know, those evil Chinese who can't be trusted.
There's something about them you can't trust.
And I think I pulled out this next clip by one of our least favorite congressmen, and that's Crenshaw.
And here is him questioning the CEO of TikTok, Shao Shi Chu.
And if we could put that next one up and play that whole clip, I think there's just, it seems like there's an element of this.
Let's listen in.
In other words, ByteDance, and also your TikTok employees that live in China, they must cooperate with Chinese intelligence whenever they are called upon.
And if they are called upon, they're bound to secrecy.
That would include you.
So, Mr. Chu, if the CCP tells ByteDance to turn over all data that TikTok has collected inside the U.S., even within Project Texas, do they have to do so according to the Chinese law?
Congressman, first, I'm Singaporean.
That's fine.
In other words, Byte Dance.
So basically, he's assuming that the guy, so you as a Chinaman are going to have to.
And he says, sir, I'm Singaporean, you know.
You know, when he was saying this, and he was accusing China, well, you know, if they're dictated and they might have to turn it over, that's what our government does to our business people endlessly.
You know, there's nothing that you can withhold.
And they use it to impeach everybody that they want to impeach, punish people, and especially control the news media.
Yeah, they're always doing that.
And they say you have to reveal it.
And if not, we're going to go after you.
So that was a bit hypocritical.
There's probably some truth to it that, yes, they do, but it sounded like it was a law similar to what is used in our country.
Yeah, they didn't talk about that.
Well, let's put on this next clip because there's a couple things.
This is from anti-war.com's write-up of the story.
And it says, the allegations that since TikTok is Chinese-owned, it's obligated to share user data with the Chinese government.
As you just pointed out, Dr. Paul Well, that kind of happens to us too.
But TikTok's CEO denied the allegations when he was grilled by Congress and said the user data is American data stored on American soil by an American company overseen by American personnel.
Whether or not that's the case, it's pretty irrelevant.
But I want to put this next one on because there's another great quote from Senator Paul about this.
And I hope people will listen to what he has to say.
He says, I hope saner minds will reflect on which is more dangerous, videos of teenagers dancing or the precedent of the U.S. government banning speech.
For me, it's an easy answer.
I will defend the Bill of Rights against all comers, even if need be, from members of my own party.
Well said.
You know, here's a sentence that Rand writes about.
He said, he also said that TikTok has agreed to house all the data on the cloud.
You know, that's not like top secret, but they might have to go through the process.
But it's not like that we're in a nuclear war with somebody and what really has to be kept secret.
But it's a hypocrisy, I think, that's annoying us right now.
And we don't like to see that.
And even you started it off with the senator who introduced this particular legislation.
You know, he's good one day and bad the next day on the same principles.
How do you get along with Russia?
How do you get along with Vietnam for that matter or China?
But they never have that interest because if their interest is being consistent and open, you know why I think they really are annoyed about that?
That means you have to read the Constitution in the same manner.
And that's what Ram was doing on the Constitution.
You know, looking at the Constitution.
But that doesn't excite people.
There was one time on the House floor, I was trying to defend that bill, and I said, you know, it's a bit of hypocrisy, it goes.
But I concluded by saying that one of the worst defense of what I'm trying to say here is that I used the Constitution.
The best defense of trying to get you to vote is the people that get up here and say, Company AABC supports this bill because they can get jobs here, you know, all that stuff.
So it, but, but no, it's, it, it's, they, they may make a mockery out of the Constitution, and I think that's a bipartisan problem.
And it's a bad look for Republicans because this is the most nanny state approach to anything.
For your own good, we're going to not let you go on this website.
You know, thanks a lot.
Well, I guess we'll move on now.
This is a this is kind of good news in a weird way.
If we can actually, I sent those two out of order.
If we can skip ahead one to the one with Senate votes to repeal.
I got them backwards.
I don't know.
There we go.
Thank you.
This is from antiwar.com and Dave DeCamp.
Senate votes to repeal Iraq war authorization for the use of military force.
They repealed, I thought just the first one, I had forgotten that they repealed the 2002 authorization, but also the 1991 authorization.
I had no idea that was still in force.
It was a vote of 66 to 30 to repeal this authorization.
I heard a little bit of the debate on the floor, and it was basically saying, well, it was one person who supported the war, I forget who it was, saying, well, if we had known what we know, you know, now, then we wouldn't have voted that way, and you know, this and that.
Of course, I was thinking in my mind, there are some people that did know, and they, you know, and a lot of people knew, but anyway, so it's good news.
You know, now during that time, I remember that period very well because that's when I got to know Dennis Kucinich and Walter Jones and others, and we were trying to stop this.
But in a way, we can't be bragging about anything because we win, we win, they're not going to pass.
They're getting rid of the bill that we, after all the death and carnage and the money.
It just think that the simple thing was, back here, it was so complicated that probably somebody that was educated about the Constitution in a grade school level, if it weren't a government grade school, they would know.
Oh, you can't do that unless you have a declaration of war.
You know, a young teenager would probably know that, but it's totally ignored.
And what I think we're working also on, young teenagers know that you're not supposed to print money out of thin air.
Iranian Act of Heinousness 00:02:14
Of course, of course.
And we obviously haven't learned anything because we're trying our best to get into war with Russia without an authorization or a declaration, I should say.
Now, if we can back up one, I just pulled this one clip out, this one quote out, because I think it's interesting.
Because you say 2002, that authorization, that's so old and dead.
Well, actually, the 2002 Iraq authorization was most recently cited by the Trump administration in 2020 when it killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike in Baghdad.
So it's been used as recently as that to commit a heinous, heinous act.
This is something he should have been impeached for, not the other stuff.
It says, but since then, President Biden has cited Article II of the U.S. Constitution to justify airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, claiming they were launched in, quote, self-defense of U.S. troops illegally occupying Syria.
I thought of you immediately when I read that line.
That's why they're shooting at our planes.
But you know why they killed the Soleimani in Iraq?
Because they wanted to get the authority from the 2002 authority to go to war against Iraq.
I think it was Iranian, you know.
But they waited until he got over there.
He was sort of like on a business trip.
Peace mission, actually.
Yeah, that was tragic.
So that's the kind of thing that you want to cheer on, you know, people that claim, oh, well, I'm a libertarian.
I tell people that over the years, I've never had anybody come up to me.
Many times they would come up, and they wouldn't say it out loud.
They say, you know, Ron, I'm really a libertarian on this issue.
But then when it comes to, I always follow that up by saying, I never had somebody come up and tell the truth.
Hey, Ron, I'm a socialist on this issue.
On that issue.
I'm an authoritarian.
Well, before we go to our next story, I think we've exhausted this one.
By the way, I just will mention that Senator Paul, again, this is Rand Paul Day, but he put out an amendment to repeal the 2001 authorization, which really needs repealed, and it failed miserably in the Senate.
But hats off to him for trying to do that.
Julie Kelly's Insight 00:13:23
Before we move on, I do want to thank our sponsor, 4Patriots.com, sponsoring the show this month.
They enable us to keep doing what we're doing.
So if you're in the market for survival food, they're the place to go.
They have a three-month survival kit, their most popular kit, breakfast, lunch, and dinner for your family for three months.
They have all different kinds and sizes of kits that you can get into Ron for a 10% discount.
Other countries, including the Chinese, are hoarding food.
They know that something is coming.
They know about inflation.
And we need to protect our families as well.
And the best way to do that is with the good folks at 4patriots.com, packed in the USA by a U.S. company.
You can store it for decades.
So go to 4patriots.com, and I will put a link after the show in the description so you can click straight over there, hit Ron, and get your discount.
Okay, we want to talk about an article Julie Kelly wrote.
I started off, and I have, this is pretty good.
And it is pretty good because she's exposing corruption in the courts.
And a surprise that a bunch of judges turned on a retiring, not a retiring, but a judge that was moving on to something else and went after them.
And not all of them, but it looked like the whole group was having this little gathering with them.
All of a sudden, they started criticizing the judge.
But unfortunately, the conclusion was the judge said, well, I'm still after Trump.
And I still have him over a barrel.
So it was bad.
But I think it was really neat what she discovered and reported this because it should give even us a little bit of encouragement about saying, don't give up, don't give up.
Because why did they come forward and do this?
You know, they must not have been worrying that it was going to injure their next promotion or anything like that.
And they all of a sudden were telling the truth.
So that's why we always have to keep that opening there for somebody and not put them under the gun and say, are you going to apologize?
Are you going to say that and change your ways?
But it looked like they had an opportunity to say this judge was Just mishandling things.
The biggest thing was that the other judges thought she was very unprofessional and had way too many secrets.
And part of it was it was an anti-Trump hatred, I think, behind most of the evil that she was doing.
Yeah, Judge Burl Howell, her name was, and she was the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court.
And it was pretty funny, actually.
You told me to take a look at it.
And here they're having a, they're celebrating, she's stepping down as the chief judge.
And all of a sudden, her colleagues, as you say, are chiding her.
Hey, why do you have so many secrets?
You know, why are you doing this?
And it was just kind of a great moment that there are some good people out there that don't like what's going on.
You can put the next clip up because this is Julie's article, and it's definitely worth a read.
Time to end the veil of secrecy inside the DC Kangaroo Court.
She aptly names it the Kangaroo Court because of the way they have persecuted Trump.
And this woman seems to be obsessed with it.
And you write a lot and talk a lot about the politicization of justice and how, well, I'm an Obama judge.
I'm a Trump judge.
And I think it's a great point that you make.
And this is clearly, this was an Obama judge.
She still is a judge, but she'll no longer run things.
If we can put the next one up, this is what Howell does.
This is her thing.
As you say, she keeps everything secret.
It's all secret.
They can't see what she's doing.
But in a matter of months, Howell has authored a flurry of secret decrees, including authorization to retain the contents of Representative Scott Perry's cell phone seized by FBI agents last August, the day after the Mar-a-Lago raid, compelling testimony of key Trump aides, et cetera, et cetera.
So she's got it in for Trump.
She issues secret authorizations to do these things.
But the other thing that she's big on, Dr. Paul, she's big on fighting those evil insurrectionists.
Oh, boy.
She's putting them all to jail.
She loves doing it.
So that's the two things that she's doing.
Yeah, you know, there was an insurrection on January 6th, but I think they got the who's on the first place.
Who's first?
Who was doing the insurrecting?
So that is, they were representing a takeover of the judicial system.
And it came to light.
And maybe it has awakened some of these judges, you know, maybe changing their tune.
Maybe there is a limit, even though they were appointed by the Democrats.
And, you know, even though I talk about Republican judges and Democrat judges, sometimes I'm not reassured.
Oh, this is okay.
This one will be okay.
He's a Republican judge.
Sometimes that doesn't get you home.
But we're a little bit better off.
And there's been good Republican judges.
There's been a few Democratic good judges, especially in the old days.
They were Democrats.
And for the most part, I think I grew up thinking judges were nonpartisan.
You know, they didn't go out and give speeches or anything sort of to maintain that image, but that's not the way it is now.
Unfortunately, it's not.
But the one thing in Julie Wright's in her piece that Judge Howell has done is she has pulled a public access to watch the trial of the January 6th defendants.
So you can no longer watch these trials.
You can put the next one up.
I think we're going to skip ahead to the next one.
So you can't, the public, the general public can't watch these trials.
And yeah, go one more, and this is how she pulled it.
She says you can't watch it.
And then Julie Kelly makes a good point.
The reason is obvious, i.e. the reason that she pulled these from being public.
If citizens and independent journalists not based in D.C. had access to these courtrooms, the public would be outraged at the conduct of prosecutors and judges overseeing the January 6th cases.
They would hear federal judges routinely berate January 6th defendants, even those accused of low-level petty offenses, for their minor involvement in the Capitol protests.
The public would learn how lengthy prison sentences were often handed down for crimes no different in nature, though in most J6 caches, much less serious than those committed by the 2020 left-wing rioters that remain unpunished to this day.
And here's the last part that I think is really interesting.
She said they would hear, if they could watch it, which they can't, they would hear the weak evidence presented by prosecutors, usually nothing more than a collection of social media posts, chat messages, and cherry-picked video clips, rather than hard proof of plans to overthrow democracy that day.
And how often D.C. judges act as a rubber stamp for the government.
You know, they talk about cherry-picks, so the Republicans finally get to look at some of these things and they pick out the points that show how many atrocious lies were made by the Democrats in arresting these people.
So they do this, and then they're able to take the major media and turn it around.
They say these Republicans are cherry-picking.
And the Republicans, this to me was the legal point that bothered me the most with those trials.
That, you know, there is a rule, and if you're going to have anything toward an honest trial, the defendant has the right to the information that they're going to bring up at the trial.
And they weren't allowed to have any of it.
And of course, now, recently, due to a few good souls, including Tucker, some of this stuff has been revealed.
And interesting enough, I think there's going to be maybe some reversals, and maybe there was a significant reversal.
Actually, you're right, Dr. Paul.
Just before we started the show, I was just glancing around on Twitter, and someone tweeted: if you would put this next one up, Jacob Chansley, and unfortunately, there's not a photo included.
If there was a photo, everyone would know him.
He's the guy with the horns on his head, the QAnon shaman, they called him.
He was released from prison today, 14 months early, after the January 6th footage showed him being escorted into the Senate by cops.
He didn't do what the prosecutor said he did.
He didn't do any of it.
He wasn't an insurrection.
And thanks to Tucker, and I have to say it, Dr. Paul, thanks to the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, who released this information.
He's surprisingly doing pretty well on these things right now.
Thanks to that, when the public finally gets to see, hey, hang on a minute, that guy was just walking around with a goofy hat on.
He didn't do anything.
He didn't break anything.
So now, today, he's been released.
But that doesn't shouldn't let them off the hook because I want to put something else from the Daily Mail article.
If you can put the last one up, this is the part that makes me sick and it makes me mad.
After serving 11 months in solitary prior to his sentence being imposed and only 16 months of his sentence thereafter, it is appropriate this gentle and intelligent young man be permitted to move forward with the next stage of what undoubtedly will be a law-abiding and enriching life.
That's his attorney.
So looking at this, this guy obviously did nothing.
We finally saw the tape.
We know he did nothing.
He spent 11 months in solitary confinement.
Imagine what that does to your mental health.
You know, you're supposed to only be able to put people in prison with a fair trial.
You know, and this was not a fair trial.
This was kangaroo court.
And there's also something that says there's a limit.
If it's a speeding ticket, they don't give you cruel and unusual punishment.
That's cruel and unusual.
So what is the recourse they have?
And some of the local lower-level judges, they are elected.
But there's no recourse here through the election, you know, for the people that are so determined that they're going to be anti-Trump all the way.
Hopefully, The person and anybody has been abused, which is going to be plenty, should have a right to sue.
Yeah, you know.
And they're also, I'm still looking for the day to find out.
You know, the processes of impeachment is still available.
I remember there were, you know, some lower-tier judges, not Supreme Court, but lower-tier judges that were brought up for impeachment while I was there, and we had we voted on it.
So there, if somebody knows that in more detail, I would think somebody ought to be thinking about the impeachment.
Somebody ought to be figuring out when you can sue somebody for this, and maybe that would calm them down a little bit.
But it is, it is very annoying on what they did.
And as far as I'm concerned, that whole effort there is cruel and unusual.
But you got to stop an insurrection.
They might get a gun in there before it's all over.
Of course, there was a gun, but it looked like they were more responsible for the problems that came from it.
Yeah, the police, yeah, in that particular case.
Well, hopefully these guys were going to start being released.
They should have been released.
They should never have been, you know, arrested in the first place.
They did petty things.
A couple of them did something more serious.
So this is a good news story, but it's also a sickening story.
So I'm just going to thank our viewers.
Go to ronpaulinstitute.org and sign up for free updates from the Ron Paul Institute.
We don't send you a lot of stuff, but occasionally we will send out some updates, including about our upcoming conferences this year.
We're very excited about it.
So thanks again for tuning in.
Dr. Paul, over to you.
Very good.
And I would like to also thank our viewers for tuning in.
And we are pleased the way things are going with our little operation because we get such strong supporters.
But we're not really happy with the way the country's going.
And we talked about issues that seem to be improving a little bit, but we have to continue after those.
So when we really clean up this mess we just talked about and maybe get some of these people who are in prison unfairly, maybe they'll quit the prosecution, you know.
But no, it's a political thing that they have.
But it doesn't satisfy me, but it sort of pacifies me that truth will win out.
And, you know, I was thinking about the Kennedy assassination.
You know, I remember it so clearly that, you know, for a year or two or three, you know, it was always known who did the assassination.
You know, that it was quite evident.
Now, now, you know, nobody believes what was believed at the beginning.
So it took time for people to realize what was happening.
So I think that, you know, record everything we can for history.
All of this stuff, they can't destroy it.
There's a matter of fact, we live in an age where you don't get rid of it.
You know, you just can't get rid of all that information.
They will hide and cheat and take your cell phone from you and do all these things.
But the evidence is always going to be there.
It's a bad second choice, but it's better than no choice at all.
Is get the information out there and prove to people exactly what was going on, especially in these last six, eight years about the fanaticism between the two political parties.
Export Selection