A recent Wall Street Journal article outlined the serious recruiting crisis in the US military. It's getting so bad that even among military families there is strong pressure for the next generation not to sign up. Why does no one want to serve anymore? Could it be the same "woke" virtue-signaling that is destroying major brands like Bud Light and Target? Also today: Ukraine under pressure to make failed counter-offensive work in advance of NATO summit.
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.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
Good.
We're into July already?
Almost close to the 4th of July.
Yeah.
And I hope we're real close to a good continuation of the revolution.
We backstepped a little bit.
A little bit.
When you read about the enthusiasm that went on at the time of our starting of our country and declaring our independence, I'll tell you.
Absolutely.
Okay, now we're trying to declare independence from some crazy stuff going on out in the world.
And one thing, even early on, the founders, you know, had a foreign policy quite different, but they weren't benign.
They still thought we had to have a military, and they wanted it to have certain qualified people in it.
But right now, people are complaining.
The military is not the place to go.
There's a reputation that's being diminished about military people.
And the article we want to mention here says the military recruiting crisis, even veterans don't want their families to join.
And we know that generation after generations, people would go into the military out of respect to their parents and out of respect and desire to have national defense for the people and for the country.
But you wonder what's going on here.
Is it all a negative or what?
My first thought was, you know, if you don't have this gun-ho, you know, mindless militarism that goes on and then woke is introduced, is that really going to make us safer?
Is it going to make us more vulnerable?
It looks like it's going to not only diminish the power of the military, but it's going to diminish the enthusiasm of what happens with wokeism here at home.
So the wokeism is so invasive, and the point here, too, is that it's even invaded something as sacrosanct as our military, and they're undermining it.
So the veterans don't want to join.
And then I got to thinking, well, maybe it's good.
There'll be less militarism.
But then the next thought I had was, you know, what if they run out of recruits?
They never wanted to get rid of registration.
Do you think they need the registration to find where the 18-year-olds, and you know, early on, I don't know whether they do it now, they go through the list.
Oh, he's 18.
He's not registered.
He's committed a crime.
Well, if they have him registered and know where everybody is, what's the difference?
But, no, if economic times get bad, sometimes that increases recruitment.
Maybe even it's bad for some people now, and they might be resisting because of what they see as they don't like.
But if things get really bad, I think there's been a few draftees in this war in Ukraine on both sides, most likely.
They use draft people, and that would be one thing that would be negative.
That's why I think thinking about national defense and non-intervention foreign policy is crucial to understanding how to have the strongest national defense and the greatest chance of achieving peace around the world.
It has to be a different policy.
And hopefully our assessment is that we're on the right track in moving in that direction.
Yeah, and this is from the Wall Street Journal.
We can put up that first clip, and that's what caught our attention because we've talked about the recruiting problems in the military for a couple of times on the show.
But this is a big one, and I think because of exactly what you said, Dr. Paul, and this is the subtitle of the article, even veterans don't want their families to join.
Because as the article points out, 80% of those who join the military have some family member who are active duty or veterans.
And what we're seeing now is even those veterans don't want their young family members to join.
Now, if you go to the next clip, this is how they start the article.
They target with Sky Nispero, whose grandfather came to the U.S. from Mexico and became a U.S. citizen by serving in the U.S. Navy.
Her father, Ernest Nisperos, is an active duty officer in the Air Force with two decades of service.
For years, Sky planned to follow a similar path.
I wanted to be a fighter pilot, the 22-year-old said.
It was stuck in my head.
Now, one of the most influential people in her life, her father, is telling her that a military career may not be the right thing.
And the one thing that struck me about this article, Dr. Paul, is it went on down from reason, maybe you felt the same way, from reason upon reason upon reason why people aren't interested in joining the military.
The only thing that they ignored is the one that you've just talked about and that we've talked about, is the incredible growth of wokeism and cultural Marxism in the military.
They didn't touch it.
They didn't touch it.
That shows you how powerful this whole movement of wokeism is.
But we, when we have the chance, point out that wokeism isn't a permanent monolith, even though there are days when I think, boy, it's strong and the momentum is strong and people are putting up with it.
But I think the pressure has been great, whether it's the military or whatever, to go along because of the punishment, especially in industry now.
If you don't go along with it, I don't think a lot of these people who go along with it are necessary, hey, this is the greatest idea in the world, but this is the way I save my job.
You know, and doctors were pressured to do that in lockdown and all that motivation that they had for that.
But boy, you combine the lockdown and woke is, which really comes together because they were using the principles of wokeism to make people feel guilty for not obeying a social order that they designed by somebody else and not by people voluntarily participating.
And no, they did mention COVID in it, you know, but not in the way that we would say.
What they blamed is, oh, well, they had to close down all the schools because of COVID, and that was a major area of recruiting, and that was a problem.
They didn't mention the thousands of men and women in the military who were fired because they refused to take that deadly shot.
You know, that is, I think, a bigger factor than the fact that, oh, the high school is not open for recruiters.
Well, there's a couple of other things from the article.
If you can do the next one, now, this is a quote from a senior DOD official, and he or she says, if we can put that up, I've been studying the recruiting market for about 15 years, and we've never seen a condition quite like this.
And the article goes on to say, the U.S. Army in 22 had its toughest recruiting year since the advent of the all-volunteer military in 73.
It missed its goal by 25%.
This year, it expects to end up about 15,000 short of its target 65,000 recruits.
If I was smarter, I could do that math.
I'm sure some of our viewers are much better at math than I was.
But the next one, if we go, it doesn't look good, let's put it that way.
The next clip says, Now, Pentagon officials see recruitment shortfalls as a crisis and pledge to hit their targets in the future.
Okay, they're going to fix it.
So Army Secretary Christine Warmuth says she expects within weeks to begin drafting a proposal for recruiting overhaul so sweeping that Congress might need legislation to pass legislation to enact all of us.
So she has a plan.
She's going to fix the problem.
It's going to turn things over.
I wonder what it's going to be.
You know, something that may work to our benefit, the people who would like to change their foreign policy, is the fact that they're up against a wall because we have an empire that they deny exists, but the empire exists and it has to be based on a lot of lies.
But it also has to be based on not yet money.
Eventually it will be based on money that we don't have.
But it's based on getting people to do these things that generally they wouldn't be volunteer for if they knew what was really happening.
And they were able up until recently, able to go to war.
Some they were okay on, they got a little closer to getting true endorsement of the people.
But Korea sort of opened up the door.
Why were we there?
What happened?
Why did all these people die?
Nothing really changed.
But then when Vietnam came, how many people died?
And yet they were still in denial.
Oh, well, we still have our empire and we'll make up for it.
We have a Middle East to conquer.
We'll conquer Middle East and show that we're still there.
And now they're saying, well, we're still in the business of empire because we have been up until now, but it looks like it's fading.
We were leading the charge to get Ukraine into NATO, really built up the anti-Russian forces and let the body bags go to another country.
But that doesn't go.
You know, the people in this country think, oh, yeah, we haven't seen too many body bags and it hasn't mattered as much.
But I think that it'll fail.
You know, when you put in wokeism and then this whole idea, because I tell you what, I imagine when the many empires that have existed around the world, traditionally they depend on very, very authoritarian home troops, you know, to police the people.
It seems like we're getting that, but people are getting annoyed with that just like they got tired of COVID.
They'll get tired of that also.
But I just think that this failure or this plan that they could get away without exposing our troops to harm, I think it's a good thing that they're starting to realize that means come home, change your policy.
But don't keep pretending that one way or the other we can do it.
And of course, the thing I mentioned first is the worst consequence of all this could be the reinstitution of the draft.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we've talked on the show a couple times about what Bud Light did.
It destroyed their brand.
They say, I was just reading something this morning about how at least 25% of former consumers will never ever go back.
So they literally destroyed it by trying to embrace this woke ideology.
And I would offer a suggestion that the military has done a very similar thing.
And I have a couple of exhibits to throw out there.
Maybe I'm just overreacting, but let's put this next one up.
Now, this is from the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.
When I think of special operations, I think of brave men and women, mostly men, who do things that very few people can do because it requires an incredible amount of strength and skill.
But here's what they put out this month.
USASOC recognizes June as Pride Month, celebrating all LGBTQ plus members in our formations throughout history, et cetera, et cetera.
They fought, et cetera, and I'm sure they have.
And I don't see there's really a problem with that.
But the celebrating, I think, undermines the message.
Now look at the next one.
This was kind of a big deal.
I think we talked about it when it came out.
This is a U.S. Army colonel, whose name is Brian Donnelly. who liked to dress up in his uniform and celebrate his very, very strange lifestyle of pretending to be a dog.
And now the next one, now this just came out over the weekend and they had a lot of attention on Twitter, if you can put the next one up.
This actually came from the Department of Defense.
U.S. Army Major Rachel Jones found solace after coming out as a transgender female.
Her journey from battling depression and suicidal thoughts to embracing authenticity inspires us all.
Now the first thing I thought of, Dr. Paul, I know I've not been in the military, but I suspect when they screen people out for going into the trenches, like, have you ever had depression and suicidal thoughts?
Yes, all the time.
Okay, you're in.
It seems like that's one of the things that maybe is not the best thing.
But I want to put on a short clip, and I'm not trying to pick on this person.
I'm picking on the system that presents this and also trying to understand why nobody wants to join the military anymore.
Now, imagine you're an 18-year-old kid, and you go ahead and you cook on Twitter, and you listen to Major Rachel.
Let's listen up to, you might want to put your earphone in, Dr. Paul, or maybe you don't.
But here's Major Rachel Jones.
Hi, I'm Major Rachel Jones.
And what Pride means to me is celebrating that diversity is our strength as a nation and as an army.
Pride means something very special to me as an LGBTQ individual.
And it's a chance to show everyone what we have to offer in terms of the diverse skill sets that we bring and the diverse ways of thinking we bring into the team to make everything work better.
So she's using this to defend strengthening the military here.
Worrying About Military Destruction00:10:44
We're talking about, it looks like it's sort of participating in destroying the military.
You know, I was thinking, you know, I've been in the Air Force, involved in flying, and very interested.
And I've always been fascinated because I know quite a few people, and I've been in the Air Force, women pilots.
Yeah.
I mean, they're good, but they're sort of an exception.
But even during World War II, there were a lot of women pilots.
They weren't...
They weren't fighter pilots, but they were involved.
So I always thought, this is pretty neat.
But you know what?
They've eliminated women pilots.
You're not allowed to say women.
Yeah, that's true.
There's no more women pilots.
What a deal.
You can't even say, you know, over a period of time, there's a woman pilot, boy, that's pretty neat.
Overcome all the obstacles and show them that they could be equal in flying an airplane, but not anymore.
You don't exist.
We just eliminated all women pilots.
No women, no women.
Well, in your typical way, you mentioned the silver lining, and I think that's probably the end of what this might be, because I would hope that Middle America now will see this military, as we have it under Lloyd Austin and all the other people on down as not something that defends America,
not something that defends our value, but something that uses and abuses these recruits, these people that come in with the best of intentions and abuses them to a social experimentation of an extreme group of people who really don't reflect the basic values of the United States.
So maybe Americans will rethink their militarism when they realize that this is what they have in mind.
So I think that's been known in history that there are moods up and down, they slip, then they come back and they renew some values.
But there was also times in history when sometimes that takes a long, long time, not just one generation.
And the big question now, are we at a point where the momentum of this crazy stuff continues and gets worse, even through the bankruptcy, or will the moral and financial bankruptcy wake people up and finally say, hey, there's a different system and maybe we better look at it.
And the founders gave us a hint in which direction to go.
So I think that's the big question.
But it could go either way.
And it depends on how many people decide in the country that they'd rather live in a free society, enjoy their independence and what true liberty is all about.
Or are they going to be dependent and say, well, we've got to have more reparations.
They did something to my great-great-great-grandfather.
I want a umpteen number of dollars.
And that's equity.
You know, that kind of nonsense that goes on.
So we'll see what happens.
But I think, you know, this is what a lot of people in the libertarian movement, they're less likely to write a whole lot about the military stuff, but they are good at laying the groundwork, economic policy and foreign policy, on what is necessary when the people are ready to turn around.
And I think, and this is where you challenge me.
There's more and more people.
They're willing to turn around.
Used to be 3%.
Now it's 4%.
No, I'm just kidding because I think when there's a fair shot at it and the people know what they're comparing it to and they don't have other alternatives and the welfare state is broke, they're going to make a choice.
Oh, yeah, we want a real tyrant to keep making the food and the free stuff come.
It'll come around because I think there's a healthy resistance to the nonsense that's going on.
I think this resistance to wokeism is growing, but at the same time, they still buckle down into government and big corporation.
I never believed I could theoretically understand it, but the combination of big business and government really is putting this stuff together that makes no sense whatsoever.
90% of the people think it's crazy, yet they're still too complacent.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I remember when I worked for you on Capitol Hill and you said, you know, this don't ask, don't tell policy.
I kind of like the sound of it, you know?
And you look back, it seems so quaint.
It wasn't that long ago.
But the idea is that whatever you want to do in private is your own business.
But whatever it may be, just don't celebrate it.
It's private.
Yeah.
But they want acceptance.
And that's the reason.
More than that.
More than that.
They want to acceptance plus push their agenda and they want to be the authoritarians.
Yeah.
Well, let's move on.
Speaking of military stuff, our old friend Zelensky is back, and he's a little bit dejected.
Let's put that next one up.
This is from Zero Hedge.
He's looking around, and things are not going well, and he's getting mad at his own people.
Zelensky implores the military to show results before the NATO summit amid waning enthusiasm in the West.
Now, this has been since June 4th, the counteroffensive, which hasn't even made it to Russia's first of three or four lines of defense.
They're stuck in the gray zone, things aren't working well.
Now, he's complaining that the weather has not been good, this, that, and the other.
The Ukrainian soldiers, I was listening to Alex Christophoro this morning, and they're mad because they said the French tanks are garbage, they're no good.
So there's a lot of excuses, but what there is not is a lot of results.
What there is is a lot of death.
And it looks like he's blaming his own military for it.
Yes, and others who are supposed to come to the rescue, like the American taxpayer.
You're not sending us enough stuff.
I think you brought up the subject.
We need more bipartisanship.
Some of those Republicans aren't doing so well.
We want them to send us more stuff.
And that's why the bankruptcy is not all that bad, but that's painful.
And it can be avoided if we had common sense.
I'm not expecting that to happen.
I think we're going to go through the severe period where a lot of people are going to suffer unnecessarily.
And right now, as long as we print money and they keep taking it, we're going to still run it.
Nobody, you know, even though they talk about that deficit and all, that's a bunch of nonsense.
They essentially, and the economists in our university said, you worry, you guys worry too much.
You worry too much about the deficit.
We can handle that.
And I, you know, some of these numbers that are going up, that exponential growth of the debt is, you know, it's boomed here in the last 10 years.
But what's going to happen what they're predicting now in the next 10 years, because there's so much bad debt out there.
And bad debt is the things that have been made and built, the businesses that have been built with bad debt, bad information from interest rates, and that's going to come crashing down together.
And the world, this is a global interest.
Everybody talks about globalism.
Well, they ended up getting globalism, but it's going to be a global problem because our empire and our influence of our empire, our dollar, has been so, so great.
So this stuff will end.
That's why we better keep busy.
That's why I sure hope we have a good turnout for our conference that's coming up.
Exactly.
Well, I mean, I think between the U.S. and the EU, they sent about $250 billion, $200 billion, you know, and some change over there with literally no accounting for it, nothing to show for it.
In fact, over the weekend, Victor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, said, hey, we're going to block an additional $50 billion because we want to know what they did with the last $70 billion before we give any more money.
There's no accounting for it.
Zelensky continues to blame the U.S. We're losing because you didn't give us enough stuff.
And that continues to be what they're saying.
You mentioned some Republicans.
There's one Republican who went over there.
Let's put this next picture up just to show.
There is Michael Pence.
He's the only one to their credit.
Even Trump, of course, has said he's skeptical about it.
DeSantis is skeptical about a blank check, but not good old Mike Pence.
He's out there and giving more money.
Let's look at the next one.
Now, this is Zelensky's mindset right now.
He stressed that maintaining bipartisan support is the most important thing for Ukraine, regardless of who wins the election.
Of course, that means, translate to send us money, send us money.
He also said something that struck me as particularly crazy.
NATO without Ukraine is not NATO.
So he's begging to get in.
He wants something to happen by July 11th.
He's going to be disappointed because NATO is not going to admit a country that's at war and have the Article 5 kick in.
But the dangerous thing, I think, is that there's so much pressure on Ukraine between now and literally just a week from now when the NATO summit happens that they may try something crazy.
They've already done some false flags.
They've already done some crazy things like blow up the dam.
Even the U.S. government thinks they were involved in blowing up Nord Stream.
Yet it doesn't seem to bother us.
We keep sending them money.
They had their drones go over Red Square in Moscow.
So there's going to be a huge temptation for them to do something crazy, include possibly blowing up the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and trying to blame it on the Russians.
So this is a dangerous week.
Zelensky was involved in our political system and was criticizing Republicans and Democrats against the other.
But when I thought of it, he should be careful because there are some decent Republicans right now that are fighting to try to straighten some of this out.
So my thought was, but not the neocons.
He says, we want people to, you know, some of the people are bad people because they're talking about that.
But the neocons, I'll tell you what, they're all with them.
You know, we're all for it.
What amazes me is how some of the most militant neocons who might pick, oh, Ukraine, that's my issue.
Oh, no, China, that's my issue.
And it never dawns on them that there might be, well, that's not very consistent, but it's necessary because we are smart enough to understand the difference between Ukraine and Taiwan.
Militant Neocons and Their Issues00:06:24
Yeah.
Yeah, there is a difference, 10,000 miles.
Other than that, it's part of our empire.
Go away.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, we want to just finish with a little mention of something interesting, because this is a very famous author who is controversial for reasons it doesn't seem to me like she should be that controversial, and that's J.K. Rowling, of course, the author of the Harry Potter books, which has made her fabulously wealthy and very influential.
Now she's congratulating an anti-trans activist after the judge awards the transactivist, anti-trans activist $127,000 for wrongful firing.
So this woman worked for a company and she made a tweet Forrester, her name is.
She made a tweet saying that men can't be women and she was fired and she sued and she won.
So it's, it's very interesting topic, I think yeah, and anytime these come up, I try to read the whole thing, because when you think about the freedom of speech movement, when the government and social media became partners, and then sometimes business people, you know, do have some rights on what your employees do and it should be in an agreement in your contract.
They they shouldn't come to work.
To me it's sort of like if you go to church and you're going to a Christian church, that doesn't mean you have to give equal time to the atheists, you know, and and it's the same way here if if they're saying things and it's a political.
In this case, the speech was good speech, you know, but in some sometimes if, if somebody marches in and starts preaching radical communism within a job, that the, the businessman, should be able to protect themselves from it because it's it's property.
And that's why I think, when the, when there's ever a a controversy on do they have the right to do this under the First Amendment and all, then they should look at this.
Most of the time, you can solve the problem over a property rights Issue and contracts on what you can say and when and where, but it's when the government comes in and locks you down, and that's what happened with the social media.
It was the they were partners in crime, and it's still going on.
Yeah, well, I'm ready to close out if you think we're done.
Excuse me.
I want to put up a video.
It's just a little over a minute, which is a little longer than we try to make it.
But it's someone that you and I met in person for the first time, Max Blumenthal.
We met him at the rally, the peace rally in January, and I've corresponded with Max for a long time, of course.
But it was great to meet him in person.
He was invited to speak before the UN Security Council and talk about aid to Ukraine.
Now, he had a great 15-minute speech.
I sent out an update to our subscribers for the Ron Paul Institute, giving them a link to the whole speech.
But let's just listen to this one minute of it because it is very, yeah, go back to the beginning.
Yeah, it's very powerful.
Why are we doing this?
Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?
We've been told by people like Senator Dick Durbin that Ukraine is literally in a battle for freedom and democracy itself.
And therefore, anyone who opposes military aid to Ukraine opposes the very defense of democracy, according to this logic.
So, where's the democracy in Vladimir Zelensky's decision to ban opposition parties, to criminalize the media outlets of his legitimate political opponents, to jail his top political rival and his deputies, to raid Orthodox churches and jail clergymen?
Where is the democracy in the Ukrainian government's imprisonment of Gonzalo Lira, an American citizen, simply for challenging the official narrative of Ukraine's war?
And where is the democracy in Zelensky's recent decision to suspend elections in 2024 on the grounds that martial law has been declared?
The answer is that Ukrainian democracy is harder to find these days than that country's commander-in-chief, Valerie Zeluzhny.
So that's terrific stuff from Max Blumenthal.
And I did mention it before, but Max will be speaking at our conference.
And I'm really, really grateful to him for spending some time with us.
If you go to the next clip, that last clip, it's the Ron Paul Institute annual DC conference taking place on September the 2nd, 2023.
Which Way America?
Max will be there.
A lot of other great people that we'll talk about as we move along.
But if you watch that clip, I'm sure you are going to be motivated to get those tickets and come visit us.
We held the line on prices, even though inflation is killing us because we want you there.
Go to ronpaulinstitute.org.
I'll put a link in here, but you will see this logo in the upper right-hand corner of the website.
Click on it for more information.
And to get your tickets, come see Max, Colonel McGregor, and a bunch of other great people.
Ron Paul is going to be there.
It's going to be a blast.
So back to you, sir.
Wonderful.
All right.
You know, during the presidential campaigns, a few slogans that came out of my mouth spontaneously were well received.
One was, freedom is popular.
That's brilliant, isn't it?
But it was.
Freedom was popular.
And they liked that.
And the other one was, freedom brings people together.
And that's what we're interested in our conferences to do.
And Max, everything I've heard is very, very favorable, but I'm sure there are differences because that's why we have an open door policy to talking to people who want to talk and be reasonable and don't yell and scream.
And see where you can come together.
But there's no doubt in my mind a free society brings people together because it, you know, in a narrow sense, in one issue, you know, religious freedom in this country, up until recently when before wokeism has come in, now, basically, people respect their religious values and this is good.
But so people come together.
And I think on sexual activity, people come together.
But it's an absence of force.
People have to come together for voluntary reasons.
And this is the reason because even if you remain disagreeable with people, you do what you want.
People Come Together Voluntarily00:00:33
We'll do what we want.
And we have to settle it.
But you know, the real challenge is you have to be really radical because for this to work, you have to give up the initiation of violence and force and telling people, yeah, this is a good idea, but I know a lot more than you do, and you're going to do it my way.
And I'm in politics, you know.
That's where your problem is.
So hopefully we can participate in the solution to that type of difficulty.
And that's why we're looking forward to our upcoming meeting up in D.C.